When designing the luxury home of your dreams, you may be looking into security alarms, cameras, and fortified doors and windows. You might also be getting discouraged by how unsightly most of your options are. After browsing through numerous ugly options, you’re probably convinced that you have to choose: you can either have security, or you can have a beautiful home.
We’re here to tell you that there’s no compromise necessary. You truly don’t have to sacrifice your aesthetic for security.
Yes, you can build yourself a fortress that doesn’t look like a prison cell. In fact, it will look and feel more like a modern palace than anything else.
Welcome to modern, secure, gorgeous luxury home design, free from ugly cameras and faulty alarm systems. Here’s how you can get everything you want in your home.
Best Front Doors for Security in Luxury Homes
Let’s start with the front door because that’s where intruders often begin.
Front doors are the first stop in many intruders’ routines. Believe it or not, they typically (boldly) knock on the front door to see if anyone is home.
A local news station in Oregon sent surveys to inmates doing time for home invasion, asking questions about their methods — what they did first, how they typically entered the home, the kinds of neighborhoods they frequented, and what security measures acted as deterrents.
As expected, almost everyone began at the front door. They’d knock or ring the doorbell to see if anyone was home, and if someone did answer the door, they’d often make up some kind of excuse for being there. They might say they had the wrong house, ask the homeowner if they’d seen a dog running around outside, or — in some cases of extra-preparedness — they’d carry a clipboard with printed sheets full of questions and would ask the homeowner if they had time to complete a brief survey.
If it seemed as if no one was home, many of the inmates chose to kick down the door, believing that one loud bang was better than glass shattering — the assumption is that they’re less likely to cut themselves and that a neighbor would shrug off a loud bang as someone dropping something heavy outside while doing yard work.
A former criminal-turned-consultant interviewed for the story also pointed out that people attempting to break into homes looked in well-off neighborhoods where there was more privacy surrounding homes. Privacy trees or shrubs often served as welcome mats for intruders because they were less likely to be seen by neighbors. Luxury homes tend to be further apart — yet that privacy comes at a cost. You aren’t just hiding your home from prying eyes, you’re also hiding your potential intruder.
Think about it: the very things we do to make us feel more secure in our homes — fences, shrubs, keeping the curtains closed when we’re out — they’re actually making us targets.
The moral of this story is that there are an awful lot of failure points in regular home security. People forget to lock their doors (or shut their doors), security systems don’t deter home invaders, or they simply don’t care that you have an alarm system.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your front door is if you forget to lock it. All of our doors — both internal and external — can be made to automatically shut and automatically lock, so you never have to be concerned with whether or not you’ve remembered to lock the door or really pushed it shut.
If you opt for biometric security and a motor on your front door, you can even eliminate the need for a key. The biometric panel will read your fingerprint (or your face) and will open automatically.
You can also set specific parameters for visitors — allowing them in at certain times, but not at others. If you know your housekeeper will be coming over between 1:00 and 2:00 pm, you can set the panel to allow her admittance (with the proper credentials) during that time frame only.
And trust us when we say that no one is kicking in one of our fortified doors. It’s simply not possible.
High-End Finishes to Match Your Unique Style
We can make any kind of door — from a regular hinge to a pivot, French doors to sliding doors, and anything else you can dream of — we can customize any internal or external home security door to match your exact style. We’ve covered our fortified doors in gorgeous carved wood, customized porcelain, aluminum, hand-stitched Italian leather, glass, and even marble. And of course, we can do a combination of any of these features — wood with glass, marble, or leather with aluminum. The possibilities are endless.
Hector Martinez, renowned architect and president of Martinez Architect, Inc stresses the importance of fortified security doors matching the rest of the house so as not to stand out as a different kind of door. One of his recent clients, in particular, didn’t want there to be any break in the continuity of the design — an understandable concern when you’re building your luxury dream home.
“In this case, the aesthetics of the doors were very important because he needed a solution that matched the existing doors. And this door in particular — because of the way that they’re designed — they can match whichever design we pick for the rest of the doors which don’t need to be secure.”
For that client, Martinez worked with the interior designer to create a unique, one-of-a-kind pivot door with “a pattern of wood veneer and stainless-steel inserts.” (You can actually see it on the video on our home page at the 57-second mark .)
Martinez also points out that luxury homes oftentimes have oversized doors worked into the design plans, and that working in a fortified door (which is typically thicker than a regular door) isn’t a big deal at all. “The only thing is that structurally, we have to find a location and we secure the perimeter of whatever area the door has to be securing.”
The other major consideration for Martinez when he incorporates a custom security door into his designs is the type of security the client wishes to have. For the pivot door in question, the homeowner wanted the door to be fully motorized and for it to open via facial recognition to allow for a completely automatic operation, hands-free.
Therefore, Martinez’s crew had to plan for additional technology at the front door: the biometric panel would require data cables, and the motor would require electrical lines. Of course, the motor itself would need to be accounted for — although he said this particular one was quite small. As he recalls it, “it only took about eight inches of room,” and was housed above the door. (It’s worth noting that our current doors have motors built into the door frame, making them completely invisible.)
But beyond all the technical and architectural considerations, Martinez is also concerned with making sure his clients get the finishes, the look, and the feel they want. “The finishes are super important because 99 percent of what we do is luxury homes, so high-quality materials are a must. For us, being able to incorporate the materials that the client wants or that we envision is very important. It’s a major consideration.”
Martinez wouldn’t compromise a home’s aesthetics for a client’s desire or need to have a fortified security door in their home — and he shouldn’t have to. With today’s technology and craftsmanship, we should be able to create a door he can proudly install in any luxury home in Miami, the Caribbean, or anywhere else his clients can dream of. So that’s exactly what we do.
You don’t have to sacrifice security for aesthetics, and you don’t have to compromise your design for security. You really can have both, and we want to make sure you, your architect, and your interior designer realize it.
As for the design aesthetic currently leading the charge, Martinez confirms what we’ve also noticed in recent years — that it’s “more contemporary. People are going more modern, especially in Miami.” (If you haven’t checked out the portfolio on his website, you definitely should.)
And following that modern theme, they’re installing a lot of pivot doors. “For a front door — where’d we go oversize — then we’d do the pivot doors, which obviously are aesthetically more impressive and give you a bigger opening overall.”
If you want to stun your guests, invite them over to your brand-new luxury home, and watch their faces when your custom pivot door opens on its own. We guarantee it will be the hot topic of the evening (maybe even the week).
Regardless of your interior design style or home decor aesthetic, we can create a front door that is secure, luxurious, and elegant. If you can dream it, we can do it.
But don’t take our word for it. Check out more examples here.
Security in Luxury Home Interior Design
When we talk to clients about home security doors, they’re typically thinking of external doors to the house — front doors, back doors, sliding doors — and we can do all of those things. But we also do a lot of interior doors. Perhaps the most common being bedroom doors.
It’s not difficult to figure out why people prioritize bedrooms doors, given the opportunity. The time we’re sleeping is the time we’re most vulnerable — we’re not alert to noises of potential intruders. This is why we chose the word Sanctuary to name our fortified rooms and homes. We want you to feel like you’re sleeping in the safest, calmest place you’ve ever been in — one of our previous clients who had been stalked in the past told us she was able to sleep soundly for the first time in years.
We do quite a lot of bedroom doors for a variety of clients. Some are celebrities, like the one mentioned above who are being stalked (or have been in the past), while others are high-profile figures looking to keep their families safe at night.
One of the biggest failure points with security systems at a very basic level is that they protect your “stuff.” People tend to turn the systems off when they’re at home because they don’t want to accidentally set them off and zoning is a pain. You might set the alarm to allow for movement in your bedroom when you’re ready for bed, but then set it off when you head to the kitchen because you realize you didn’t get a glass of water.
This is where interior security doors come into play. Your exterior security doors will keep intruders out of your home, but the interior bedroom door will help you get the best sleep of your life.
And of course, we’d make sure your interior doors match the design aesthetic you’ve chosen seamlessly. In all our years of business, we haven’t encountered a request we couldn’t accommodate. In addition to the custom pivot door Martinez described above, we created nine other custom doors throughout the interior of the home.
If you want it done, we can make it happen. You’ll have gorgeous doors throughout your home and no one will know the difference between the fortified doors and the regular doors.
Perfecting the Art of Security
You’ve probably heard the saying: If an intruder really wants to break into a structure, they’ll find a way. Well, that may be true of a lot of spaces, but it’s not true of homes made with FBS windows and doors.
We take out the dozens of failure points to home security systems by simply eliminating the most common mistakes. You don’t have to set an alarm, you don’t have to hide a key somewhere in case you lose yours or someone needs emergency access to your home, you don’t even have to remember to close the door behind you.
At FBS, we’re dedicated to perfecting the art of security because we believe that feeling safe in your own home is one of the most important things in the world. Your home should be your sanctuary — not a place full of trippy motion sensors and cameras watching your every move.
We’d love to help you create your own safe space at home in whatever design aesthetic you love the most. Feel free to check out our common questions page, watch our product videos, or make an appointment to visit one of our showrooms. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can assist you in creating the luxury home of your dreams!
