A safe house for your valuables in Abu Dhabi

For the jewellery or luxury watch collector looking to protect their possessions, a bespoke collector's room secured behind a vault door in your home is the new must-have in Abu Dhabi.

Doettling - Collector rooms. Prices for the rooms, which are installed in a buyer’s own home and are designed by the German luxury safe maker Doettling, start at €350,000 (Dh1.36 million).

If last week’s safe heist in London has you worried about storing your valuables in a public place, one company is offering a very expensive alternative.

Collector rooms, which are being sold by Le Vault, a new luxury store based in Abu Dhabi, are the equivalent of having your own jewellery store secured behind a vault door.

“We design a lounge seating area with jewellery behind you and around you to give you the feel of luxury,” says Samer Mashal, the owner and managing director of Le Vault, which sells safes, trunks and accessories.

“Everything inside is displayed like you are walking into a jewellery store. At the same time it is very safe from the outside. But this costs a lot of money.”

Prices for the rooms, which are installed in a buyer’s own home and are designed by the German luxury safe maker Doettling, start at €350,000 (Dh1.36 million).

Options include mahogany or suede-lined drawers and mechanical winders to keep your watches ticking. You can even have a safe deposit box installed in the walls for extra security.

But perhaps you don’t have enough jewellery to fill a whole room, yet you still have a lot of cash to splash. Le Vault also has an answer for that – a luxury safe.

One safe in its product range, the Bel Air Magnus, which weighs 1,500kg, stands 164cm high and is 120cm wide, costs between €170,000 and €220,000.

Le Vault, based in Abu Dhabi’s Nation Towers, also sells a range of trunks made by the Italian manufacturer Royal Trunk.

One, a €30,000 make-up trunk opens out to become a dressing table. Covered in ostrich leather, the trunk has 2,000 tacks hand-hammered by artisans.

“You lock it and you move it and you travel with it. And then you open it and there is a chair inside, you pull the chair out, all the shelves are there and all the make up is there. It’s quite different,” says Mr Mashal.

So is his shop, but is he confident it will attract enough customers? “I have had a few orders but nothing as large as the collector’s room because I am still not yet known around the country or city. As soon as the word is out I am sure there will be interest,” adds Mr Mashal.

Q&A

Samer Mashal, owner and managing director of Le Vault, Abu Dhabi’s latest luxury store, speaks to Gillian Duncan about the products it sells:

How did you come up with the idea?

I am a watch collector and I appreciate watches. I just love to collect them. Basically I got to meet the owner of Doettling, Markus Döttling. I met him through a friend of mine in Germany who sells watches. He introduced me to those guys and said that you might be interested in buying a safe for your watches one day. I thought wait, this is really nice. We don’t have this in the UAE.

But you sell a few brands’ goods now, right? Not just Doettling.

[Yes] Le Vault basically has five companies under one roof. I have two major companies which are Doettling and Royal Trunk, a company from Italy which produces trunks.

Say I want to buy a collector room. What is the process?

[Doettling] designs them … and gives options to the end user of different 3D renderings to see how the collector’s room is going to look. Then you go into the material selection phase. They send their team to the country and they have to see the location and take exact measurements.

What sort of options do you offer for finishes?

The sky’s the limit. Some people might want a really expensive exterior leather like a crocodile finish, a lizard finish, a python finish. Somebody might need blue leather or white leather. Customisation- wise, you can’t really reach an end.

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