Continuing in the tradition of his great-grandfather, who founded his locksmith’s practice in 1919, Markus Döttling is the fourth generation of his family creating legendary safes. Not only is he active in acquiring, restoring, and transforming vintage vaults, he’s producing modern, customisable, high-security ones too.
Customisation is the name of the game and whether you’re looking to store your prized cigars, watches, jewellery, guns, shoes, artefacts, or even Hello Kitty trinkets, Döttling will work hand in hand with you in order to make sure your possessions are stored and protected in the most convenient and secure way possible. “It is true that 50 years ago, we were just doing regular safes,” explains Markus Döttling. “But now, we are nearly without any competition and have personas of the likes of Karl Lagerfeld designing for us.” There is apparently no limit to the creativity these safes can embody and prices can amount to millions of dollars.
Of particular note is the innovative concept of vaulting an entire room. It was Markus himself who conceived these ‘Collector Rooms’, upon which was direct demand from his global collectors. Their predicament was the following: how do you store hundreds, or even thousands, of valuable possessions without having to resort to numerous unwieldy safes? “For example, you can have a maximum of 100 watch movers in one safe. Seventy-five per cent of our safes are for watches and watch winders, the rest are mostly jewellery and weapons. Even the biggest safes cannot accommodate all the coins and bars of gold a collector may own.”
The solution is to forget about the regular, but bulky and overbearing treasure tombs that are difficult to transport and install. Instead, Döttling will create a safe room, designed to blend in with your home exquisitely. “The chameleon safes especially can be incorporated seamlessly and merged into any surrounding,” Döttling explains. What’s more, you can choose between two solutions. The first kind of safe room is fully secured, with a heavy safe door as an entrance. The second is to incorporate safes within an open room, thereby allowing you to show your possessions in a manner akin to an in-house museum.
“One of our most demanding projects was for a client who wanted to have all of his 2,000 watches and guns displayed on a single wall, behind a bullet-proof glass plate. This glass weighed more than a tonne by itself, and after our measurements were taken, we had to bring it into the room in a single piece. In the end, the only way was to crane it in through the roof of the house.”
Considering the accomplishments the firm has already achieved, it’s surprising to discover that they have done as much with a mere 15-strong core team comprising cabinet makers, restorers, metalworkers, leathermakers, electronic engineers and security experts. And whether they are producing safes for Europe or the Middle East, everything is produced in in Maichingen in Germany, before it is assembled on site.
Markus assures clients that, in addition to the desired aesthetic accoutrements, each safe will have the level of security its owner requires, however elaborate that might be. “Most collectors want to show their possessions off, but need to know they are protected and so we have a house alarm system that includes a silent alarm which goes off in case of burglary, when the owner is forced to open the visible safe. This alarm is activated with a different code than the standard one, only known by the owner. We are going to integrate fingerprint scanners soon and other highly complex systems,” Döttling confesses, “We recently completed a safe with a defence system. A microcamera was installed inside and connected to the client’s home alarm system. When an intruder enters the room, the camera inside the safe detects the intruder and calls the owner’s mobile phone. And if needed the safe is even able to exhaust a gas that would immobilise the intruder.” Now that’s what we call security.
www.doettling.com
