Tetelbaum Safes: The Vaults of the Russo-Baltic Royal Trains

A car that stops bullets still needs somewhere to keep the valuables. DARTZ has had an answer for as long as it has had a history.

1869: a workshop inside the works

DARTZ traces Panzerschrank Manufactur von Tetelbaum to 1869, when it began as a subdivision of the Russo-Baltic Wagon Factory in Riga. It is named for Mihoel Tetelbaum, one of the entrepreneurs who, by the end of the century, turned Riga into the third-largest industrial city of the empire after Moscow and St Petersburg, and a shareholder of the works.

Safes for the royal trains

The Russo-Baltic works built coaches for the Russian royal trains. DARTZ says the Tetelbaum workshops were entrusted with armoured components for several of those coaches, and with the safes of the saloon cars used by the Romanov family. Those safes, DARTZ says, held the family’s jewellery on their journeys at home and abroad, Fabergé eggs included, which the imperial family liked to admire through reinforced glass.

A separate manufacture

As the business grew, the workshops became a manufacture of their own. On the eve of the First World War, DARTZ says, Tetelbaum safes were found in the homes and offices of the industrialists, traders and bankers of Riga, Moscow and St Petersburg. One admirer was Sergey Perlov, of the tea house Vassily Perlov & Sons, who kept his collection of Chinese porcelain, a gift in 1896 from the Qing statesman Li Hongzhang, in Tetelbaum safes.

Now in its third generation

Tetelbaum still builds bespoke safes, now in its third generation, and DARTZ says some even come with motors inside, a know-how it keeps to itself. In DARTZ cars they take a different form: biometric safes for guns, money and cigars, which the owner can monitor from a phone. They are standard in the Aladeen Edition MMXXII and fitted in the Black Alligator.

The Opulent Vault Department, DARTZ says, creates safes as opulent and as secure as its cars.