Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 14, 1995 TAG: 9509140040
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MEMPHIS, TENN. LENGTH: Medium
One customer wanted a small, hidden safe for stashing a single jewel worth $100,000. Another wanted a steel-walled, secret room in which she could hide herself.
They both got what they asked for.
The hiding places were built by Custom Security Inc., a Memphis company that designs secret vaults so hard to spot no burglar has ever found one.
``There's not a safe made that you can't crack, but you can't crack it if you can't find it,'' said N.B. Perkins, the company's founder and president.
Over the past 15 years, 242 customers who have Custom Security safes have been burglarized, but none of the safes was touched, Perkins said.
Unlike home or office safes often seen in the movies, vaults made by Custom Security aren't just behind pictures on the walls.
They may be found, though, behind what appears to be an air conditioning vent, a pantry shelf loaded with food, the wall of a cedar-lined closet or an ordinary-looking piece of baseboard.
The various safes at the company's showroom, itself unobtrusively located behind a warehouse, are indeed invisible to the unsuspecting visitor, or the suspecting one, for that matter.
But with the press of a button here or the pass of a small magnet there, doors pop open and drawers slide out.
``You're only limited by your imagination in how you hide them and how you activate them,'' said Dan Perkins, the company founder's son and chief designer. ``I've even used a magazine rack on a wall right beside a toilet.''
The elder Perkins, a former stockbroker, got interested in hidden safes in 1980 after designing his own to protect a gun collection.
Friends began asking for ones like it, word got around, and his small company was born. It now employs 13 workers and does about $790,000 in business a year.
Perkins is working on plans to expand to other cities and, perhaps, take the company public. His crews have traveled to Atlanta, Miami, St. Louis and several other cities to install safes, but the vast majority of their work has been around Memphis.
The company has installed more than 3,000 safes, ranging from single steel drawers a foot and a half long to walk-in affairs the size of a small room.
Prices range from $600 to $10,000 or more, depending on how elaborate a customer wants to get.
The bigger vaults, while serving as standard fireproof, walk-in safes, also can be made into what the Perkinses call ``anti-terrorist'' rooms complete with backup electricity, independent ventilation and cellular telephone.
One of the Perkins display safes is a 10-by-11-foot room with an ``anti-terrorist'' door that can be locked from the inside.
The entrance is through an ordinary-looking closet with a steel-lined outer door blending with a cedar interior. Inside is the thicker vault door leading to the hidden, steel-walled room.
``Hopefully no one would even know we were here,'' the younger Perkins said inside the room. ``But if they had followed me all they way to here, they'd never get me out.''
So far, the Perkinses have sold five of the secret rooms. They got the idea from a wealthy woman who was looking for a walk-in safe for her valuables but wanted it modified so she could hide in it herself.
``Her hobby was horror movies,'' Perkins said.
The company doesn't ask customers why they want their safes and information on who buys what is tightly guarded.
The younger Perkins said his biggest safe, a 20- by five- by eight-foot affair, was installed at the modest-appearing residence of a Chicago woman. He said he didn't know why she wanted it until he saw her one night on a TV news show.
``She just happened to be one of the biggest collectors of a certain item in the country,'' he said.
by CNB