With ballistic steel discreetly infused inside, your safe room door and frame can be upgraded to stop dozens of powerful firearm rounds per UL 752 ballistic standards.
Level 3 Ballistic Upgrade
High-powered handguns, such as .44 magnum
Level 8 Ballistic Upgrade
Military Assault Rifles, Such As 7.62 Rounds
Forced Entry Resistance
When criminals – or even a mob – attempt to break into your panic room, US DoS standards offer the ultimate confidence that your and your family will stay secured.
According to the FBI, millions of property crimes, such as burglaries and home invasions, are committed each year. Many of these incidents occur when people are not at home. However, there is a disturbingly large number of home invasions that happen when people are in their homes, a place that most expect to be safe. Having a panic room – a place to which you can retreat in the event of a crisis – provides peace of mind to you and your family.Weapons Used During Bakersfield Home Invasion – Photo by Kern County Sheriff OfficeWithin the room, the panic room door is the most critical feature.A safe room provides safety against attacks from home invaders, stalkers, and others who wish to do you and your family harm. When building one of these rooms, it is essential to understand the types of attacks that the panic room might have to deal with, so you can be sure you are selecting and installing the right panic room security door. The door is what will keep the enemies out and your family safe within.Let’s look at some of the elements to consider when making your choice of a panic room door.
Types of Attacks
People will go to great lengths when they intend to come into your home and break into your safe room. They may use a wide range of tools in an attempt to gain entry, so you need to be sure you have a safe room door that is capable of successfully defending against what is likely to be used against it.
Firearms
Criminals have easy access to both handguns and rifles of various sizes and calibers. They may use these weapons not only as a way to intimidate and potentially kill but also to get past doors or other locks. Rifles are much more powerful due to the robust velocity of their rounds. Rifles are generally limited to very high-profile, pre-meditated situations; handguns are much more commonly the firearm of choice. Both are highly dangerous, and both can potentially cause problems for a low-quality panic room door.For panic room applications, our clients typically upgrade their safe room door with ballistic steel. However, even without this, our doors will not practically allow illegal entry by merely using a firearm. We may all be able to recall movie scenes where a single bullet to a lock cylinder popped a door open. Our doors have 16 or more four side locking bolts. In reality, shooting hinges or lock components is irrelevant to the door standing strong. That said, in the case of a panic room, ballistic cladding is still often needed. A bullet may pass through our door without causing the door structural damage, but it still is a tremendous risk to the people standing inside the room. If you expect occupants to be in direct sight of sight to the door, we recommend including ballistic material to stop multiple rounds. The type of ballistic material used can vary. In some cases, it might be high-strength steel. In other cases, it could be fiberglass or even ceramics.However, this does not mean that just attaching ballistic fiberglass or steel to a door that you already own will result in an effective panic room door. The added weight from the ballistic material is significant. This additional weight can cause problems with the hinges, meaning the door might not work correctly. It could even be heavy enough that it starts to tear the hinges loose, making the door difficult, or even impossible, to open and close. Most importantly, a DIY solution such as this will result in a panic room door that is still highly vulnerable to simple forced entry attacks.Axes, large pry bars, sledgehammers, battering rams, and more are used to officially test whether a door is strong enough to be installed in a panic room
Forced Entry
While firearms are a home invader could use, criminals’ greater likelihood is using common destructive tools to defeat your safe room door. For example, one of the most common methods for force a door open is with a crowbar. The vast majority of safe room doors are easily pried out – or their deadbolt merely misaligned – with a little leverage. Unlike firearms, a tool such as this is readily available at all hardware stores. Of course, there are other methods of forced entry, as well. For example, someone might attempt to batter the door down with a battering ram. They might try to hack the door down with a fire ax. Some might use a sledgehammer. Others may use more precise techniques to gain entry, such as lock bumping or picking unlawfully. Multiple options exist to defeat the vast majority of safe room doors.
True Security
A proper panic room door is built from the ground up to protect its inhabitants in a rapidly accessible and consistent way. According to US Department of State standards, independent labs rigorously test our high-security safe room doors for forced entry. Our doors seamlessly integrate ballistic steel internally. Their engineering is perfected through decades of fine-tuning features and installation for residential and commercial applications. And their craftsmanship is honed to blend into your home beautifully.
Your safe room door will use the finest European craftsmanship and materials. The secure core discreetly contains all high-security features.
Stained Wood Panel
We clad panic room doors to match the house’s surrounding doors’ intricate millings, allowing for a discreet appearance. Solid natural woods and engineered woods available.
Painted Finish Panel
Our interior security doors can be pre-painted in the factory to any of several hundred RAL international colors. We mail a complimentary color wheel to all clients for precise matching to nearby hallway doors.
Fully Custom Design
Some clients want their safe room to have one-of-a-kind designs. Every safe room door we create is custom and of limitless possibilities. The client can, alternatively, attach locally-sourced milling on top of our secure door core.
ADDITIONAL DESIGN Options
Ballistic Glass Lites & Transom
Solid Woods
Mahogany, Oak, Alder & more.
Layered & Raised Paneling
Powder Coating Finish
Stainless Steel Finish
Vault-Strength Lock System
Lock system is pre-installed at the factory into your panic door
Several lock options are available for our safe room doors. All come pre-installed into your door at the factory.
Unlike most other panic room doors, all of our bolts engage by a single, highly secure cylinder. A single action gives you a completely secured seal when you are in your panic room.
Mottura 85.771
Manufactured by an advanced Italian company since 1973, our standard Mottura lockset is as beautiful as it is secure. Comprised of polished thick steel bolts with the following arrangement:
Ten active bolts on the handle/strike side
Up to eight passive bolts on the hinge side
One active bolt on top and one on bottom of the door leaf
The lockset is highly protected. Even without upgrading your panic door with bulletproof steel, a firearm cannot practically defeat our lock: the independently controlled, fail-secure bolts keep the door securely in place.
We specially protect the lock mechanism itself with drill-resistant manganese-steel.
You may upgrade your safe door to have single-handed egress – at no additional cost. Single-handed egress offers easy locking by lifting the handle on either side. While in the panic room, pushing the handle down disengages the bolts for easy exit.
ISEO X1R Easy / Smart
Another precision Italian manufacturer, ISEO ( formerly Fiam), builds sophisticated motorized and automated locksets. Its security is as robust as our standard Mottura option, with the same 16-20 thick steel bolt arrangement.
The X1R’s motorization of all the active bolts allows for considerable convenience. Clients who upgrade their safe room door to the X1R may also upgrade with a digital keypad or biometric fingerprint scanner embedded into the door leaf, making entry into their panic room completely keyless.
Alternatively, the panic room door can integrate with a client’s third-party access control device. Installers can easily integrate the locking system with the home’s alarm systems for smart software, even allowing a security team to remotely monitor their client’s safe room.
There are other features too. The armored door can automatically fully lock whenever closed; a simple button press on the safe side can fully unlock the door – and there’s always a backup mechanical thumbturn as well.
The X1R Smart provides additional Bluetooth capabilities out of the box. Using a unique owner’s key card, the client may connect their safe room door to a secure phone app to control access for themselves and others. The owner can even run a log of attempted and successful entries into their panic room.
Locking Considerations for Panic Rooms
When planning your panic room, thinking through your ability to get inside promptly and safely in the first place is of significant importance.
When possible, we recommend keeping your panic room door normally-unlocked to allow your family’s immediate entry in an emergency. In a case where the door will be normally-locked – such as a room that doubles as a secure home vault – using access control options that do not require any key or other secondary device is ideal. We offer sophisticated digital keypads and biometric scanners embedded right into the door leaf.
In this way, the human is the key – no need to frantically search for a traditional key.
It is crucial you locate your panic room logistically convenient to reach by most people in the home. In some cases, clients build their panic room into an area where they need not even walk to get there. A typical example is a bedroom that discretely doubles as a safe room; even while sleeping, they are secure. Fortified Estate’s team can review your floor plan and make recommendations on where to install your panic room.
Once inside the room, it’s essential your emergency locking system rapidly deploys. After all, in situations like these, you have only a short time available for getting to the room and locking it down. Consider the locks’ location, bolts on the safe room door, and the people’s heights and abilities in your home.
Make sure that the locking mechanisms are all within easy reach and easy to understand. Don’t assume people will know what to do when an emergency arises.
We recommend training your family to:
Learn the quickest path to the panic room from common areas
Understand how to engage the panic room door lock properly
Understand how to disengage the lock safely and at the appropriate time
You will want it to become second nature so that everyone can respond quickly in case of an actual emergency.
Our panic room doors allow you to throw all bolts with a single action mechanically. The single-action can be a simple twist of the thumbturn or even lifting the handle when our door is equipped with Mottura lock’s single-handed egress. If desiring zero possibility of user-error, the Fiam X1R option offers the fantastic solution of auto-locking all bolts upon door closure.
Contact our team today for expert analysis on which lock system may make the most sense for your setup.
Safe Room Door Automations
Automatic Locking
Ensure your panic room is full armed every time the door is closed. All 16-20 bolts rapidly engage.
Biometric Scanning
The highest-security fingerprint scanner available, with 1-in-10,000,000 accuracy and live-finger sensing.
Concealed Door Closer / Opener
Discreet design with hold-open features and an ultra-smooth close – never forget to close your panic room door.
Not only are our safe room doors custom-designed to fit aesthetically into a residence, but specialists also engineer them for easy residential installation, perfected by years of placement into hundreds of homes.
Our armored doors easily install into a panic room’s wood studded or masonry walls. The frame uses numerous 4″ lag bolts to anchor into the surrounding wall. (Many clients also install ballistic panels to armor their safe room walls.)
The primary difference between installing a panic room door and a standard interior door is the weight. Our doors have a multi-layered thick-steel core, and the entire unit (door and frame) can weigh well over 500lbs, especially if ballistic steel is layered inside.
Example Shop Drawings of A Panic Room Door
However, our residential safe room doors also have numerous features that make installation easier and offer ad hoc flexibility. The assembly includes three-dimensional adjusting barrel hinges, a built-in steel shim system, an adjustable strike plate, a removable bottom bolt with an in-floor sleeve, removable door cladding, and more.
Most importantly, our engineers and fabrication experts personally assemble, test, and optimize the full door system in the factory prior to shipment. As long as the client’s contractor carefully measures out the rough opening and installs the door with a careful eye to being level and plumb, the door will work flawlessly.
Our panic room doors are entirely made-to-order. We craft them to blend into your home – this requires several custom steps: from engineering to welding to bespoke milling. The process takes much longer than a standard, mass-produced door. Production typically takes 6-8 weeks.
To achieve the best results, we utilize craftsman and component fabricators who are the worldwide leaders in their field. Therefore, our custom safe room doors generally complete production in Europe. Shipping to the client’s home takes around two weeks for air freight or 4-7 weeks for ocean freight.
A certified panic room door ranges in cost from $8,000 to $20,000+.
Our system includes a secure door core, custom milled wood cladding, armored frame, multi-point locking bolts, ballistic steel layers (optional), concealed wiring for automation (optional), insulation, hinges, three-dimensional cylinder, and much more. Additionally, the doorway is entirely assembled at our factory, optimized, and tested.
The price variance primarily depends on the following factors: the security level of the door; whether the door core and frame will be ballistic (and to what strength); whether the door lock will be mechanical or motorized, such as with a biometric scanner; whether the door is a single or double leaf, and; whether the door has unique design elements such as thick mahogany or glass inserts.
Attempting to convert a standard door into a panic room door has numerous issues, which can mostly be categorized as follows, from least important to most important:
Design Issues – We’d consider this the least important issue, but to many home owners it likely is a deal breaker for a door to have an obvious and unsightly panel covering one side.
Functional Issues – A standard door is not designed to handle the weight that ballistic material adds. The door will likely immediately be difficult to easily swing, and in the short term begin to have issues with the door being unable to close into place or be unable to open once closed. Both are obviously critically problematic in emergency situations.
Security Issues – Most importantly, ballistics is actually the less important aspect of the door’s security. Resistance to attack is what’s of primary importance. A standard door with a ballistic panel attached is no harder to pry open or disengage the lock than the same door without a ballistic panel.
We believe in – and therefore only provide – protective safe room doors that meet specific forced entry ratings by the US Department of State.
There are additional features worth considering for a panic room’s entrance.
We recommend having a mechanism for determining what is going on outside the door. Visibility allows you to know when the coast is clear and when to call the police.
A peephole is one option; we offer forced entry and ballistic peepholes.
For a more discreet option, we recommend using a camera system. You may use a camera pointed towards the panic room entrance or even place cameras throughout the home. The video can output into the panic room or be available on your smartphone or tablet.
Some clients entirely hide their panic room door. Builders will sometimes install faux paneling or shelving in front of it. In most cases, it isn’t practical since the room usually serves a day-to-day dual purpose, such as a bedroom or master closet. In all cases, a panic room door needs to be discreet – blending is accomplished by applying milling, which matches nearby interior doors. Our safe room doors are entirely custom and already clad at the factory, with milling expertly-designed to replicate your home’s other doors.
Client storing food in their panic room
Depending on your threat profile, an overpressure system may be a worthwhile installation for the panic room. Positive pressure significantly limits contaminants, biohazardous particles, and even smoke from entering the room through tiny cracks in the door system. A proper air system will also filter out incoming air to medical-grade levels. Our team can guide you with solutions used by past clients.
Having a panic room in the house can make all the difference in the world in the event of a home invasion or burglary. Getting the features right in your safe room door is one of the most critical aspects.
Our team provides safe room and secure home solutions to clients around the USA. 1-844-656-FORT
Fortified Estate, LLC
1900 Jay Ell Dr.
Richardson, TX 75081
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