There is a growing and very public trend in the US for at-home safety and security amenities. products, materials and personnel. People want their families and themselves to be safe in our increasingly armed and volatile world.
One such homeowner spent six years thinking about and building a home that would protect himself and his family from the vagrancies of violence. He commissioned a security architect with two decades of experience designing secure buildings for the US Department of Justice to design his home. The result…a home that includes a 15,000 square foot bunker with off-grid water and power access from three artesian wells drilled 1,000 feet into the ground that would enable the family to live undisturbed for months. Secret doors from the main residence access the bunker.
Known as Rice House in the neighborhood of Country Club of the South in a manicured, gated (of course) community of Alpharetta, Georgia just outside of Atlanta, the residence has 36,000 square feet of living space and 3.5 acres of land. There are 8 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, 3 kitchens, a private museum, an indoor shooting range, commercial grade elevators, a bowling alley, a private theater, an infinity pool, wine cellar and a car vault hidden by a waterfall that holds 30 vehicles.
Workers constructed the foundation of the home by digging down to bedrock and then boring into it. The walls are made with extra strength concrete re-enforced with rebar. All the bedrooms have anti-ballistic doors that can withstand AK-47 assault rifle fire.
Rice House was originally built as a family legacy however, the son in the family has decided that he doesn’t want the property. Initially listed for the asking price of $17.5M, well below the construction cost of $30M, the house was recently relisted for the price of $14.7M. An additional $3-5M is needed to complete the house with yet-to-be-done interior finishes.
Might the Rice House be the safest house in America? The marketing materials for the house claim only that it is “one of the safest” in the country but the listing broker, Paul Wegener of Atlanta Fine Homes Sotheby’s International Realty, said, “This is a home where you could put a $20M painting on the wall and sleep confidently at night. The same goes for your family.”
