Most homeowners have hiding spots for valuable possessions — a safe, drawers underneath (or in between) clothing items, behind hanging clothes in a closet, or even a hidden compartment in a wall.
It can be difficult to figure out the best place to hide valuables in your house. The places you think are smart end up being the first places that criminals look. (This isn’t their first rodeo.)
The drawers in your dresser, your freezer, a fish tank, a toilet tank, and even boxes in your pantry are all places that criminals know to search. They’ll probably hit your master bedroom first, but if they don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll keep searching until they find something worth selling.
So where does that leave you? You still need hiding places for the important or irreplaceable items you own.
For many people, the immediate reaction is a safe. It makes sense in many ways — they’re difficult to open, they’re a pain to steal, and they keep everything valuable in one place. But in practice, safes aren’t… well, as safe as we like to think they are.
We have a better solution that uses the same logic as a safe, but is much more effective. Instead of a big, bulky piece of metal, you get something that seamlessly integrates with the careful design aesthetic in your residence — and is very discreet.
Here’s how we propose hiding your most precious possessions — whether they hold monetary value or not.
Common Items People Keep in Safes
People store all kinds of precious items in safes. Some are priceless, some are expensive, and others threaten safety in more modern ways.
Some of the most common items people store in safes include:
- Expensive jewelry
- Family heirlooms
- Emergency cash
- Passports
- Important paperwork (i.e. birth certificates, adoption papers, immigration paperwork, work visas)
- Sentimental items that are irreplaceable
- Weapons (i.e. guns or knives)
While some of these items hold very little material value (paperwork and passports), some are obviously worth a lot of money. In fact, criminals know that the biggest ticket items will be jewelry and guns. They know they can sell those items and get cash — especially the guns.
It’s also important to remember that the items not seemingly worth anything (like the paperwork) may not be easy for intruders to sell, but that doesn’t make them less valuable.
If the paperwork you’re storing in your safe has your social security number on it, they could either steal your identity or pay someone else to steal it.
And of course, all of these items give intruders more information about you and your personal life. It tells them where you work, what you do in your free time, perhaps the bank you use (and maybe even your bank account and routing numbers), and what’s important to you.
The contents of your safe are a window into who you are. Even if you don’t care about the financial implications of stolen goods, intruders having greater knowledge of who you are could also have dire consequences.
Why We Recommend Hidden Compartments in Security Doors
Before we get into why traditional safes aren’t your best bet, let’s dive into the solution we prefer. If we’re going to tell you that safes aren’t the best place to store your most valuable possessions, we should also give you the answer you’re looking for.
We talk to all of our clients about placing hidden compartments in their security doors — specifically their bedroom security (or Sanctuary™) doors. There are multiple reasons for this suggestion.
Convenient Placement
Perhaps the most obvious reason we recommend that hidden compartments be built into your bedroom security doors is because that’s where you’ll go if someone manages to get into your residence. This can also be said for any other room where you’ve installed an FBS security door.
If an intruder somehow enters your home — which would not happen if our security doors and windows are installed — you should have some sort of designated place to go. Some people call this a panic room, but honestly, we’re not big fans of that idea (learn more about why we say that here).
But the concept of a safe room — having a place where you go in the event of an emergency is important. Instead of building a panic room, we advocate for building a Sanctuary™.
If your bedroom is your designated Sanctuary™, you’d run in and make sure the door is closed behind you (the default setting is locked, and you can upgrade the hinge to make sure it always closes).
When that door closes, you’re safe. They won’t be breaking it down and they surely won’t be taking it off its hinges. They can bang on the door until they’re blue in the face, but they’ll be staying on the other side of it.
The reason this placement is so perfect is that you have access to any of your emergency supplies. If you have weapons stored there, you have them — just in case. If you keep an emergency cell phone in there in case you don’t have yours on you when you enter your Sanctuary™, you’ve got it and can make any phone calls you need to.
They Won’t Notice (or Even Think to Look)
Even if someone — somehow — gets into your Sanctuary™, the intruder wouldn’t even think to look for a hidden compartment in your bedroom door because they won’t know it’s a security door.
Our custom security doors can be designed to look exactly like every other regular door in your home. From the door handles to the woodwork, we can make sure no one has any reason to believe your bedroom door is any different from the room next to it.
While a facial recognition panel may be on the wall next to the door, it’s not garish. It’s relatively inconspicuous in and of itself when it’s not in use. It could look like a control panel for a home automation system or smart thermostat.
Seasoned criminals will know the best hiding places for valuables and safes. They might even check behind your paintings or check to see if bookshelves could be easily moved.
But really, who would think there would be a hidden compartment in a random door?
Security Door Hidden Compartments are Completely Inconspicuous
Unlike a traditional safe bolted to the floor of your closet, a secret compartment hidden in your security door will be completely inconspicuous. (That’s literally its job.)
We have gone through painstaking efforts to make sure that we can completely disguise hidden compartments. We will intentionally design the door to make sure that every border of that opening looks like a natural part of the design.
For example, you can see on this door that there are wood panels. That’s one portion of the covering this client chose to incorporate into their bedroom security door. (As a reminder, your custom security door can actually look like two different doors — the exterior side can be one design, while the interior side can be another entirely.)
As you can see, there are breaks in the panels, which we have purposely done to disguise the hidden compartment. It’s more visible in this photo because someone is about to open it using a biometric fingerprint scan.
These days, we don’t use fingerprint scanners because they’re not as secure as facial recognition software. However, this does demonstrate the ability to open your hidden compartment in a different fashion to make it more difficult to get into.
What we typically recommend in these circumstances is to use facial recognition to open the door itself and then a separate Invisiprox™ sensor to open the secret compartment. This sensor (pictured below) looks like a simple keychain that you can keep just about anywhere.
We’d recommend keeping it either on your person (like on your keychain, if you keep your keys in your pocket) or near the door itself. Keeping the tag closely means you’ll always have access to it when you need to open your hidden compartment.
These Hidden Compartments Cannot Be Stolen
Another reason we recommend secret compartments inside our custom security doors is that they cannot be stolen.
While criminals may take a safe out of the residence to crack it on their own time, they’re not likely to take a large, heavy safe — it’s simply too cumbersome.
We’re confident when we say that there is no way anyone is removing the hidden compartment from our security doors. They’d have to either crack it open to get to the contents or literally take the door off its hinges (which will not be happening, we can assure you).
Even if — by some miracle — the intruders were able to detach the door, our custom security doors are heavy. They weigh hundreds of pounds and require a team of contractors that are accustomed to moving heavy objects to install them. Trust us when we say that criminals will not be walking away with your security door.
Why Traditional Safes Aren’t the Best Hiding Spot
On the surface, it makes a lot of sense to store valuables in a safe — it locks, it’s difficult (though not impossible) to steal, and very difficult to crack open (at least for the average person).
Safes aren’t exactly inconspicuous. People typically put them in closets, and criminals know this. In fact, the first place they typically go is the master bedroom — that’s where the most important items will be, and they know very well that your safe is probably in your closet.
The trouble with safes is that you’re essentially advertising where you’re keeping the things that are near and dear to you. Someone determined enough, with the right tools, and with enough strength could steal the safe, and then everything is gone.
Your grandmother’s engagement ring, the watch you bought to celebrate a milestone in your life, and the rare tanzanite necklace you found at an estate sale — all in one place, and all gone.
Not every criminal will attempt to steal a safe. It’s nearly impossible to do with only one person, so they’d need at least one (perhaps more than one) partner.
Additionally, it takes time to get a safe out of a building. Ideally, criminals trying to get a safe out of your residence will be doing so when they’re very sure you’re going to be gone for a while — perhaps while you’re out of town.
If the safe is large enough, they probably won’t bother trying to steal it — it’s just too cumbersome. But if it’s small enough for a couple of people to carry, they might do it. It will be easy enough to get off the floor and out the front door.
Once the safe is out of your home and where they feel comfortable, they’ll have as much time as they need to crack it, and then they can scrap it.
There’s something to be said for hiding in plain sight.
Getting Started with a Custom Security Door
At FBS, our main goal is to help you feel safe at home. You might travel a lot for work. Perhaps you might have a media circus following you everywhere you go. You might be high profile and value the sliver of privacy you can get from your primary residence. We just want to help you achieve peace at home.
We’ve worked very hard to make sure the security works around your lifestyle — you shouldn’t have to work around the security. After all, we’re here to make your life easier.
If you’re ready to discuss your security concerns and the possibility of putting a hidden compartment inside your security door, contact us today. While our main headquarters is located in South Florida and our products are manufactured in Italy, we ship worldwide.
It doesn’t matter where your residence is located — we’ve shipped to countries all over Europe, multiple regions of the United States, and even Jamaica.
Whether you’re looking for a bedroom door, a front door, or new security windows, we’ve got you covered. We look forward to hearing from you!
