Sales of Home Safes Surge, Driven by the Recession and Recent Disasters

“You know how women used to get hope chests?” said the man, who insisted on anonymity for fear of tipping off thieves. “Well, this is a man chest for my man cave.”

His $2,700 safe, which was installed in March, was a custom job: it has a high-gloss, hunter green exterior finish, brass hardware and a fawn-colored velour interior.

“It was kind of like ordering a new car,” he said. “It looks great and gives me peace of mind.”

Manufacturers of residential safes — companies like Liberty Safe, Sentry Group, Allied Safe and Vault and Brown Safe Manufacturing — report an increase in sales to customers like the Danbury engineer. Recent events, including the mortgage crisis, the recession, tornadoes in the South and the earthquake in Japan, they say, are prompting more people to keep their valuables at home.

“We’re hearing a lot of people say they are closing their safety deposit boxes and bringing their valuables and important papers closer to home, where they can get their hands on them quickly,” said James Skousen, a spokesman for Liberty Safe, adding that his company had seen a surge in people buying safes to store gold and silver bullion bought as a hedge against the dollar.

In fact, sales of residential safes at Liberty, he said, have increased 40 percent since 2009, and spiked 25 percent in the first three months of this year. Other manufacturers and retailers of residential safes report similar trends: At Brown Safe Manufacturing, for instance, sales have risen 30 percent annually over the last three years, and sales of “luxury,” or very high-end safes, which make up 20 percent of the company’s business, have gone up 30 percent in the last year as well.

Indeed, customers have an expanding range of products from which to choose. Safes are no longer just gunmetal gray boxes with locks — they have a host of customizable features to satisfy owners’ aesthetic desires as well as their security needs. There are also more safes that look like ordinary household items but have secret compartments, (or diversion safes, as they are known in the trade): not just the standard hollowed-out book, but less expected items like a fake head of lettuce or a can of soda, with space to hide that gold watch or diamond bracelet.

FOR many, the primary appeal of home safes is easy access. Two years ago, a 38-year-old office manager in Columbus, N.J., bought a 175-pound safe not because she feared economic Armageddon, but because she wanted a convenient place to lock up her jewelry.

“I didn’t want to have to drive to the bank to get my jewelry out of a safety deposit box every time I dressed up to go somewhere,” she said.

Her burgundy-colored safe, which has a gray, carpetlike interior and a capacity of two cubic feet, is bolted to the floor of her closet. Although her home already had an alarm system, she said, having a safe “makes me feel more secure.”

“You can’t just pick up that thing and walk out with it,” she added.

Others are less concerned about burglars than the sticky fingers of those they know, including housekeepers and greedy relatives.

As Lynel Brown Berryhill, vice president of Brown Safe, in San Marcos, Calif., noted, “Customers increasingly have been telling us they want a safe to prevent petty theft of jewelry and cash by their help,” who may feel strapped these days because of the higher cost of gas and food.

Prices for residential safes start at about $20 for a basic fire-resistant lockbox about the size of a loaf of bread. But so-called luxury or estate safes might be as big as an armoire and cost as much as $100,000. Such a safe often has an upholstered interior, exotic hardwood shelving and a custom exterior finish.

“We just installed a safe in a guy’s living room who wanted it to exactly match the color of his MacBook Air,” Ms. Berryhill said.

Some of these safes also have biometric locks (which read fingerprints or irises), GPS antitheft systems (LoJack-like devices, in case someone manages to carry the safe away) and automatic watch winders (so expensive watches stored in the safe keep perfect time).

MOST people, however, are more concerned with basic security: how well does the safe protect their belongings from theft and fire?

Some manufacturers use standard industry ratings to communicate this to consumers. A safe can be rated B, C or E, for example, depending on how thick its doors and walls are; a safe with the lowest rating, B, has a door that is a half-inch thick and walls a quarter-inch thick. There is no third-party authority, however, that verifies these ratings.