This underground Las Vegas home, a luxury bomb shelter, is on market for $18 million
This is a house like no other. Yet, it’s beneath all others.
Built 26 feet underground, the subterranean bunker has no natural sunlight, but it’s designed to make you feel like you’re in a normal home with a lawns, a pool, trees and even views. Murals of green pastures, deer, forests and mountains decorate the walls and a fake sky mimics daytime hours as well as night (with sparkling stars, too).
The concrete and steel home is on the market for $18 million.
Stephan LaForge of Berkshire Hathaway in Henderson, Nevada, who is the home’s listing agent, told Money magazine that he’s gotten a lot of calls since the home went on the market, even if they weren’t necessarily from bona fide buyers. .
“There’s been lot of interest in the sense that people want to look at it,” LaForge told the magazine in a Jan. 30, 2019 article. “It’s like an attraction, like going to Disneyland.”
“As the U.S. population lived through the terror of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s, thousands of Americans began building bomb shelters with the hope that their families might survive a hydrogen bomb,” writes toptenrealestatedeals.com in an article about the house. “The idea of a nuclear war was a boom for the construction industry as Americans began digging underground planning for the day the Russians might drop the ‘big one.’”
One subterranean dweller went big time. That’s Avon Cosmetics executive Girard Henderson.
With the help of engineers and architects, Henderson designed the elegant bomb shelter, which was completed in 1978 with all the luxuries of a regular house, and lived there until he died in 1983. The private underground structure is located under an attached standard 2,316-square-foot house on little over an acre of gated land with two two-car garages.
The entire site measures nearly 15,000 square feet. The four-bedroom, four-bath house has 5,000 square feet of living space, with two utility rooms, two staircases and an elevator. On the grounds are a 450-square-foot guest house, lawns, swimming pool with waterfall, two spas, outdoor barbeque, trees and 500 linear feet of floor-to-ceiling murals of city and mountain views with lighting that simulates day, dusk, night and dawn, according to toptenrealestatedeals.com.
The mid-century house has a chef’s kitchen, large combined living and dining rooms with wood-burning fireplace in the living room, game room, sauna, large bar and venues for entertaining inside and outside.
This story was originally published February 7, 2019 at 12:46 PM with the headline "This underground Las Vegas home, a luxury bomb shelter, is on market for $18 million."
