'If Germany was invaded tomorrow, it's not going to be ready for that, unfortunately,' he said.īut it's not only the wealthy who are buying. More recently, Vivos Survival Shelters has started selling space in a former East German bunker for $2.7 million - even though Dante Vicino, their executive director, said they're 'still working on' making it habitable. In 2014, a 15-storey condo built inside a former missile silo in Kansas was able to sell out its 75 units for $1.9 million and up. Vivos Europa One, a luxury bunker project inside a former East German government bunker, is still not fit for habitation, but tunnels are being sold for nearly $3 million a piece. 'We have very, very different kinds of people, and from different backgrounds,' he said. Mathieu Séranne, whose Paris-based company Artemis Protection is only one year old, said he has received more than 900 requests for quotes and designs since the war began five weeks ago. (Searches for 'nuclear,' meanwhile, are at their most numerous since the 2011 Fukushima disaster.) Google Trends data shows searches for 'bunker' spiking to levels that haven't been seen since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Russia's intensifying conflict has inspired a wave of worry across Europe about the threat of nuclear war, prompting some with means to investigate the possibility of building their own shelter or renting space in former government facilities abandoned for their impracticality as a means of protecting civilian populations. 'Everyone was getting really frightened.'

'From the first day that it kicked off in Ukraine … my phones were ringing,' said Charles Hardman, director of Subterranean Spaces, a bespoke bunker and basement design company in the United Kingdom. Amid daily scenes of devastation in Ukraine, one sector is cashing in on rising fears of war: the world's manufacturers of backyard bunkers.

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