Luxury homes should be flawless sanctuaries. Home is where you go after a long day (or week) at work to relax and unwind. It’s the place where you shouldn’t have to worry about something being off. After all, you’ve certainly paid enough for it — it shouldn’t be anything less than perfection. And part of that perfection is making it completely secure.
One of the weak points of any home is the garage. Luxury homes are likely to be made with more durable materials than builder’s grade homes, but even so, it’s an opening (or two or three) to your home that isn’t entirely secure. Between the garage door, a regular man-door as a side entrance to your garage, and a fire door leading into your home, you’ve created quite a few potential failure points in your overall security.
The answer, of course, is to add security doors to the mix — and we’ve got you covered.
Making a Custom Garage Door
Believe it or not, your garage door can be a security door and it can be completely customized to fit your preferred style. Because garage doors are larger than your typical door, creating them poses unique challenges, but we’ve never backed down from a challenge. Let’s talk about creating a garage door that satisfies your need for security, but also fulfills your desire for a one-of-a-kind luxury home. First of all, let’s discuss the three major purposes that garage doors serve:
- Keep your cars inside to protect them from inclement weather.
- Keep unwanted visitors out of your home.
- Conceal the fact that you’re not home (on account of the missing vehicles).
These are very basic purposes. For many people, a garage door is barely something they think about. But you’re not the average homeowner. You didn’t go to a realty website and find a house within your price range in a neighborhood close to your job. You’re in a position to be more discerning. Your garage door doesn’t have to be something that basically everyone else has — not even every other luxury home owner you know.
The Most Unique Garage Door We’ve Made
Without a doubt, the coolest, most unique, awe-inspiring garage door we’ve ever made was a massive pivot door. 
Yes, you read that correctly. It was a pivot door, but it was a garage door. The garage itself was already a step ahead of the security game in that it was very well hidden on the property — it was set into a hill. Needless to say, it was a blast to work on and then finally watch in action when it was installed. Now, this isn’t the type of garage door that functions by pressing a button and it slides up. It could… but that’s not nearly as secure (or frankly, luxurious) as the other options. Anyone can steal a garage door opener. We tell all our customers that if they want the most secure door humanly possible, it needs to be motorized and use facial recognition software to unlock it. The reason this is so secure is because your face cannot be duplicated. Your facial bone structure remains the same throughout your life, regardless of the aging process or even plastic surgery. Your face from the mid-forehead to mid-nose does not change. Because this structure is unique to you, it’s very difficult to hack. It would be nearly impossible to get past. To use facial recognition on your garage door (which would need to be a pivot door because of its size), we could run the wiring to a location a few feet back from the door — this could be a dedicated structure build to house the technology, or it could be embedded into the side of your home. When you pull up next to it, the scanner will confirm it’s you and then open the door. You won’t have to do anything more than roll down your window and turn toward the scanner. We have to warn you though: once you try this out for yourself, you’ll never be able to go back to regular old keys.
Don’t Forget the Fire Door
The final — and most forgotten — door in any attached garage is the fire door. It’s the one that goes from your garage into the main house. This door serves two major purposes:
- Keep intruders from entering your home without permission if they were to get into the garage.
- Protect you, your family, and the rest of your house in the event that a fire starts in your garage.
Because cars rely on flammable materials to function properly (i.e. gasoline and oil) and are full of other materials that can spark and cause a fire (i.e. electrical systems and airbag detonators), garages pose a certain level of danger. Now, there are mountains of regulations in place to ensure that cars are made as safe as humanly possible, and it’s not as if cars explode or catch on fire for no reason. (That would be pretty catastrophic for the automotive industry.) But things happen. 
Sometimes, what appears to be a minor car accident turns out to have damaged something you weren’t aware of. Sometimes, there are factory defects that haven’t been discovered yet. Sometimes, the conditions are just terrifyingly perfect. And of course, there may be items stored in the garage that feed a fire quite easily. For these reasons, a door leading from your garage to your home must be fire resistant. Because the fire door is often a security risk, we took the liberty of creating a security door that is also fire rated. While this upgrade is often chosen for the garage, it can be applied to any door you order to be installed in any location. For example, some of our clients in dry climates that are more likely to have active wildfires (such as California), fire doors are a relatively standard request, both internal and external.
Custom Doors with Fire Certification
When people think about fire doors, they think about a lightweight, boring, white aluminum door. It feels cheap and doesn’t fit with the rest of the aesthetic that you, your architect, and your interior designer have worked so hard to craft in your luxury home. We completely understand. You may have guessed by now that we don’t think you should have to settle for that boring fire door. You can have a custom fire door that is designed entirely to match your existing decor — even creating a different design on each side of the door so it works on both sides. If your garage is painted white and you don’t want to break the continuity, we can choose white multilayer laminate to cover it. The interior side of the door can be completely different, not just in color concept, but in textures, fabrics, and wood stain. And just like everything else we do, it can be basically anything you can dream up.At one point, we had a client who wanted their fire door to be completely inconspicuous — as in, they didn’t want it to be at all possible to find it. The door needed to entirely blend in with the wall. If someone were to somehow get into their garage, they wanted to make it seem as though the garage didn’t provide access to the house. They wanted their custom fire door to be motorized so there wouldn’t be a need for a handle (which would give away the location of the door), and they wanted the locks to be controlled by a facial recognition scanner built into the door so that it too, was completely invisible. This may sound like a difficult task — and don’t get us wrong… it is — but when you’ve been doing things like this for as long as we have, you learn some cool tricks to hide the seams of the door. 
In many ways, this is easier with a new build or a renovation because you can work with the architect from the very beginning. However, it’s not at all necessary. We can match almost anything — literally. Our artisans in Italy have been able to create the same marble patterns in new materials that already exist in a client’s luxury home. (It was flawless, and absolutely unbelievable. The homeowner was floored.)It doesn’t matter what you want the door to look like. We can make it happen. And regardless, it will still be a high security door to make sure that no one can get into your house if they somehow get into the garage (but we’re going to do our best to prevent that as well).
The Advantages of Garage Security Doors
Turning your luxury home into an impenetrable fortress means analyzing all the weak spots in your home, and one of those is the garage. As we already said, the garage poses interesting security threats because there are typically at least two entrances to it, plus a door leading into your home (that frankly, a lot of people forget to lock). If someone gets into your garage, getting into the house is really easy. But even if they can’t get through the fire door, they could wait in your garage for you to leave the house. If you’re installing security doors and windows throughout the first floor of your new luxury home — or going through the process of having your existing doors and windows replaced with security-grade products — you’d be leaving a major weak spot open to potential intruders. Fortifying your garage will help you rest easier at night, knowing that your house is completely secure.
Comprehensive Security Assessment and Planning
Another major advantage of working with FBS is that we can provide access to a team of security experts to help assess your security needs and formulate a plan to completely secure your home in conjunction with your existing security team. And when we say “security experts” we mean it — the team at LionHeart International is composed of former Secret Service agents and military personnel. Not only will they help you determine what level of security you may want to invest in based upon the threat level, they’ll help you plan for emergencies (such as a security breach or even a fire) and they’ll secure your data as well. Working with the LionHeart team isn’t a requirement, but it’s a perk that many of our clients enjoy taking advantage of. Going through this extra step makes them feel like they’ve done everything within their power to protect their families. 
How to Get Started: Fortifying Your Garage
The first step in completely fortifying your garage is to check out our offerings on the website. You can look at our doors and windows to see examples of work we’ve done in the past, and get ideas for your own luxury home. Please also check out our articles, which provide more in depth discussion about our product offerings and features. You can also read through our frequently asked questions.When you’re ready to learn more, give us a call. We’re used to getting calls from architects, interior designers, and homeowners alike. We’re here to help, to answer your questions, and help provide you with a sense of peace. We’re based in Boca Raton, Florida, but our security doors and windows are hand-crafted in Italy and can be shipped anywhere in the world. (It’s true — we recently overhauled someone’s villa in Jamaica with all new security doors and windows strong enough to stand up to the strongest hurricanes.)Our clients expect us to be heavily involved and in regular contact with their team, and we completely understand that. We won’t just take your order and pass you along the line. We’ll work with your designer and architect to create the doors of your dreams and when they’re ready, we’ll be there to supervise the installation. If you’re ready to fortify your garage with security doors (and maybe windows), feel free to contact us today!
