When Paul Weldon, a joiner by trade, visits clients he is transported to another world: one resplendent with wealth. “It’s surreal,” he says. The 50-year-old designs and installs panic rooms — places to hide from intruders or kidnappers until security or the police arrive — in the homes of prosperous families. On one trip to visit a client in a “poor country” (discretion is everything in his profession), he was struck by the disparity between the fleet of white Rolls-Royces inside the private estate’s perimeter and the scale of the poverty outside.
Panic rooms are a niche market that — according to those in the industry — is on the up, driven by concerns over terrorism, attacks, robberies and kidnappings among families of financiers, high-level executives, entrepreneurs and celebrities. The Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who depicted the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, is believed to have been saved from a man wielding an axe in 2010 by escaping to a fortified room.
There are generally two types of safe room. The most common are designed to protect against intruders or kidnappers, and might be anything from a fortified closet, bathroom or bedroom, to a designated room. Then there are the rarer “bunkers”, which are equipped for coping with natural disaster or terrorism, and which may include air-infiltration systems. The priority is to be able to communicate with the police and possibly private security protection.