Bunker mentality
Talk about a CEO hideaway.
When Dr. Brian J. G. Pereira wants to kick back from a hard week as chief executive of Cambridge's Amag Pharmaceuticals Inc., he heads up to an island vacation home in Casco Bay, Maine, that comes with its own bunker. As in a World War II bunker with eight-foot-thick walls, two dozen hidden rooms, and slits for artillery once deployed to protect Portland from a Nazi U-boat invasion.
Back in 1998 when they were both at Tufts-New England Medical Center, Pereira and his neonatologist wife, Dr. Sunita Pereira, found the two-acre bunker property for sale while visiting Peaks Island with their kids and quickly bought it. Over the next two years, as Brian spent available weekends hacking down trees and brush, Sunita planned and supervised construction of a home atop the bunker, with Casco views on three sides. Still a work in progress: What to do with the 12,000-square-foot plus bunker itself. Three brainstorms the Pereiras are entertaining are a subterranean art gallery; a geothermal heating/cooling system for the house piping in year-round 50-degree bunker air; and renting rooms to island oenophiles for wine cellars.
"We do company executive retreats there," Brian Pereira says. "The company saves money, and the team gets a good bonding experience at my home."
PETER J. HOWE 