Playboy pad: Apocalypse Chic

REFINED AND PRIVATE, CAPABLE OF UITH-STANDING A NUCLEAR STRIKE—STEP INSIDE THE ULTIMATE 21ST CENTURA VACATION HOME

P n June 19G2, the United States Air Force completed construction on

• a dozen Atlas F nuclear-missile silos outside the town of Plattsburgh

L in upstate New York. It was the height of the Cold War, and President

Kennedy would soon order the missile teams (continued on page BE}

WINGING IT Who needs highway traffic? The Silohome has its own private

airport. A hangar sits on the far end of the runway.

PLANE AND SIMPLE The silver bird you see here is a 1946 Ercoupe.

TQP SECRET A keypad [above] opens the door that leads from the upstairs living space into the secret underground play­room-bomb shelter.

SUCH A NIGHT The main living space [below) resembles a private mountain getaway with room to spread out and large windows that look out on the Adirondacks.

BOOM TOUN

The military specs outline the Atlas F missile's silo [above] and launch-control center (top left). The missile itself carried a type W-38 thermonuclear warhead that yielded about 3.8 million tons of TNT-more than 250 times as powerful as the "Little Boy" bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

on alert. Atlas mis­siles were the first ICBMs to be stored in vertical silos, which were 174 feet deep and 54 feet wide, with two con­crete doors on top weigh­ing 180,000 pounds each. Just three

years later, due to rapidly advancing weapons technology, the missiles were decommis­sioned and disposed of, leaving the silos to decay like stab wounds in the earth.

Jump forward to 1989. An investor named Gregory Gibbons stumbled on one of these silo sites and purchased the 100-plus acres for $50,000. "It was a wreck when I bought it," he says. "I wanted to salvage something and do the G.I. Joe thing." Gibbons called his cousin Bruce Francisco, a builder, who flew up to check the place out.

"Everything was overgrown, and the silo was full of 3 million gallons of water and sludge," Francisco remembers. "I thought, What do you do with something like that?" They decided to build a home on top of the silo and a luxurious bomb shelter beneath. Says Francisco, "It was the craziest thing I ever did."

First they pumped out the silo. They built the house and laid out a private air­port. Then they turned the underground missile-control room into a bomb shelter-man cave. "It was like raising the Titanic," Francisco says of the job.

Today you enter through the main house, which is roughly 20 minutes from Lake Plac-id's ski slopes. Three flights underground and beyond two bank-vault-like doors sits the old circular control room-about 2,300 square feet of space that can withstand a nuclear strike. There's electricity. With the heat off, it remains 58 degrees Fahrenheit no matter the weather. The silo itself is down another concrete corridor, still unfinished.

The "Silo-home" is currently for sale for $4.6 million (silohame .com], not so much when you consider that when hell freezes over you'll be sitting pretty in your cave at a cool 58 degrees.

DOWNWARD SPIRAL The original staircases built by the military still exist. From the house, stairs (right and above) lead underground to two vault doors (above left]. These massive doors lead into the original circular launch-control room (below). MAN CAVE According to the military literature, the Atlas F launch-control center "is a cylindrical structure 40 feet in diameter and six and a half feet below grade." This entire area is built on shock absorbers, an air-suspension system made to "absorb ground shock"-in other words, a nuclear strike. The launch-control room had everything humans would need to sur­vive underground for some time: office, battery room, communications equip­ment, medical supplies, toilet, kitchen and mess. Now the area is set up for a different kind of subsistence. THE LIGHT OF DAY Francisco and Gibbons designed a lighting system that mimics sunlight, even though the rooms are underground. The bathtub (below left) sits by a window lit from behind.