My Home Renovation Obsession Meets Bunker Real Estate

This week my friend Kathleen sent me this excellent and quite humorous New Yorker story by Patricia Marx on her forays into the survivalist bunker real estate market. 

Highly recommend the read, because there are some interesting facts such as 39% of Americans believe we’re currently living in the end times. Although, when Kathleen and I texted back and forth about this fact we wondered if maybe that’s an undercount, with all of the end times philosophizing built into a whole lot of fundamentalist Christianity, Also, does that also count people like me who do think it’s some kind of end times, but not the kind of rapture end times Christians think? But I digress.

The rabbit hole I went down was the underground bunker-building business. I’m a sucker for home tours and renovation/building shows and this opened up a whole level of fascination for me. Perhaps we, too, could get a bunker in the style of my minimalist Scandi dreams?

One company featured in Marx’s story is Atlas Survival Shelters which, in addition to some “luxury” shelters that will run you up to a cool $500k, sells a precast concrete shelter for a mere $20k. But I’m not here to look at these one-room concrete domes that’ll merely keep me safe in a one-off bomb blast, I’m here for luxury and living such as Atlas’s Modular underground bunker that is fully customizable and ripe for making it your own with just the right accouterments. And boy do they have interior design to capture my attention. A gleaming modern shower, a stylish and practical barn door to the bunk room, and a gun room styled with no less than two dozen guns. What more could you ask for?

I particularly appreciated the living room which honestly looks like it could be a nice little condensed basement bonus room with a stone accent wall and a nice little wine rack. 

Some images from Atlas Survival Shelters

Intriguing, but I wanted to ogle more at where one could take their underground living.

Enter: Vivos Global Shelter Network. The website, while still not chic or modern, says more you are part of the wave of the future and less protect your own and your guns like Atlas’s. You scroll down and you’ll see photos of “luxuriously”-ish appointed underground spaces that were most definitely designed by a man who did not know that furnishing and painting an entire underground room brown will still make you feel like you’re underground. Scroll down even farther, and there’s a pool. You read that right…a pool! No explanation about this pool, of course. Diving a little deeper, it looks like this bunker community is somewhere near Jena, Germany. I wanted to know more.

It was at this point that I realized I had heard of Vivos before. I had read about it in Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse where he visited one of Vivos’s sites in South Dakota. Now this ain’t just any shelter for your home, this is a whole damn community. In fact, Vivos consists of five planned or current underground communities around the world.

“Vivos was offering more than just the provision of ready-made bunkers, turnkey apocalypse solutions,” writes O’Connell. “It was offering a vision of a post-state future. When you bought into such a scheme, you tapped into a fever dream from the depths of the libertarian lizard-brain: a group of well-off and ideologically like-minded individuals sharing an autonomous space, heavily fortified against outsiders–the poor, the hungry, the desperate, the unprepared–and awaiting its moment to rebuild civilization from the ground up.”

Who wouldn’t be into that?! A brand new society!

(Also an aside: I can’t recommend Notes from an Apocalypse more. O’Connell does a deep dive into wealthy preppers which is both fascinating and alarming).

Most of Vivos’ sites seem to be fairly affordable, $35k per person in Indiana or $50k per bunker in Vivos xPoint in South Dakota. Vivos Europa, however, the one in Germany boasts “The Ultimate Life Assurance for High Networth Families” where 450 sq meter pods can be “Customized like a luxury yacht to your specification.” That, my friends, is where the pool is. Or so I thought. Having forced me to watch their surprisingly doom-and-gloom-free promotional video, I discovered the pool, finding out that it was, in fact, a decoy. I wanted to see underground opulence to the max. However, I was just seeing what it could be like in underground opulence as the pool image was accompanied by pictures of other gaudy hotel-like interiors with exceptionally shiny floors, a lot of brass, and a propensity for deep brown furnishings that show examples of how high networth families can bring their McMansions underground. Also, what is it about the brown?

Having gone through a deep-ish dive into the interior aesthetics I’ve come to the conclusion that, at least aesthetically speaking, I’m not these dudes’ (because they're all dudes) target market. Perhaps I’m more an Atlas gal (maybe aside from the gun hoarding interior design in the gun room) but when Marx noted in her story that the owner of Atlas had sold bunkers to such folks as the Tate brothers, maybe not.

In any case, it’s been a funny deep dive into this realm because it makes you wonder about what disasters are being pictured to warrant setting up shop indoors for extended periods of time. I should say that the disasters I’m picturing aren’t necessarily bunker-type disasters. But who knows. The rapture could come any time.