Anyone who’s been planning a dream home and has a “safe room” on the must-have list might have a change of heart after seeing “Panic Room.”
The movie thriller, starring Jodie Foster, is about a mother and daughter caught in a maelstrom that turns their steel safe room –or panic room–into a potential death trap.
Their panic room is a hidden space off the master bedroom in a newly purchased, huge house in uptown Manhattan.
The rich, eccentric previous owner installed the panic room as a hideout and to provide protection from intruders. It’s an eerie, forbidding space loaded with television screens that monitor doors, hallways, staircases. You’ve seen the trailers, the ads or the movie. You know.
Early on, the movie’s marketing-publicity machines turned out press releases about the growing popularity of panic rooms “in our increasingly dangerous world.”
Those releases, in turn, inspired a spate of newspaper stories. A typical yarn goes on and on about the families whose “worries are increasing the demand for secure rooms, which cost between $50,000 and $1million to build.”
Why?
“Child abductions, workplace and school shootings, stalkings and home invasions,” according to some of the movie’s consultants. One, builder Bill Rigdon of Los Angeles, said there are “hundreds” of panic rooms in every large American city.
Well, maybe not.
“Hundreds” seems high even to some safe-room specialists and Chicago-area builders. “I have not seen a single floor plan with any type of designated safe room,” said developer Paul Lehman of Macom Corp. in Naperville.
Architect Charles Page, known for his custom-designed upper-bracket homes on the North Shore, seemed surprised to hear that safe rooms are becoming a big trend.
“It’s more novelty than trend,” he said. “Trends are always emerging, but this isn’t one of them.”
Orren Pickell, whose name is associated with luxurious homes, including the ultimate high-tech Renaissancedot.com House in Glencoe, said he’s experienced “no huge demand at all.”
Pickell, who built about a half dozen homes with safe rooms during the ’90s, said the interest in safe rooms “has slowed down since then. People find other ways to spend their money.”
Among those ways, according to both Page and Pickell, are elaborate security systems. Wealthy homeowners feel more safe with such systems guarding their homes, grounds and garages than with a safe room, according to the builders.
Where safe rooms “do make sense,” according to Pickell, is “as a refuge during threats of storms.”
And that’s exactly where safe rooms are indeed growing in popularity, according to Dorothy Andrake, a mitigation specialist at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which has spearheaded efforts to promote safety rooms and shelters.
She said the interest in residential safe rooms has grown tremendously in recent years, adding that almost all the calls to the agency for information about safe rooms “are weather-related. Very few mention security,” she said.
So much for the hoopla created by the “Panic Room” publicity gurus implying that homeowners want panic/safety rooms that are bullet-proof.
Andrake said buyers of new homes, in particular, want safe rooms for “peace of mind,” particularly with so many parts of the country experiencing high-wind destruction.
Among such high-visibility disasters were Hurricane Andrew in 1992, deadly tornadoes in Oklahoma in 1999 and, much closer to home, the devastating tornado that hit Plainfield in 1990, taking 29 lives.
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Both FEMA and manufacturers of insulating concrete forms (known by builders as ICFs) use data collected by the Wind Engineering Research Center of Texas Tech University to call attention to the need for protection in tornado-prone areas (primarily Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas).
In essence, this is their message: It’s debris, not the wind, that causes destruction. The most durable and safest materials that can be used for homes, or for safe-rooms,are the insulated concrete forms that “can be stacked like Legos,” says Patrick Murphy, president of American Polysteel, a manufacturer of ICFs.
The forms, made of polystyrene (the foam-like material used in ice-chests), are reinforced with steel bands, stacked and filled with cement, which hardens to concrete.
They have additional virtues: They’re sound-deadening (good for buildings near airports, railroad tracks and heavy-duty night life, such as North Halsted Street) and they’re energy-efficient (Murphy says ICFs can cut heating/cooling costs by 50 to 80 percent).
A windowless, interior space–such as a walk-in pantry or closet, or a utility room–is ideal for a safe room.
Better yet, she says, are the homeowners who are having their media or home theater rooms built within the insulated concrete forms–which practically guarantee soundproofing.
Panic/safe rooms
What’s a safe room? A space built in a new home or retrofitted into an existing home with materials (concrete, steel) that can generally withstand tornadoes, hurricanes or bullets.
What does it cost? An average for an 8-by-8-foot shelter in a new house can range from $2,000 (in-ground) to $6,000 (depending on materials, location). It costs about 20 percent more to add a shelter to an existing house.
Who needs a safe room? For the most part, those who live in high-risk wind zones, notably Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and even parts of Illinois.
Info: www.fema.gov; www.concretehomes.com or www.polysteel.com.