Have you ever wanted to hurl your plate across a room—like a soap opera star in a lover’s quarrel—or break furniture and bust electronics like a rebellious rockstar? If so, you’re not alone. In fact, a fondness for wrecking objects is how Aaron Pope came to pivot from his lawncare business to operating his own rage room. During a foreclosure cleanout and weary of the off-season income dip, he mentioned to a coworker a certain attraction for breaking objects left behind by tenants—and his phone was listening. “My phone sent me a Facebook post for the Anger Room in Texas, the first of its kind,” he says. “Immediately, I knew I’d found my ideal year-round business model.” In 2017, Pope opened the Destruction Room, located in Virginia Beach, where: you bring the stress, and we clean the mess.
Rage rooms, found throughout the Commonwealth, are gaining popularity as fun, safe spaces to relieve stress through the physical demolition of objects. Customers choose from a menu of items to destroy—like glassware, electronics, and furniture—as well as one’s favorite tools to do the dirty work. Crowbars, bats, and sledgehammers are customer favorites, while many choose to simply self-hurl an object against a brick wall or cement floor.
Packages are usually based on time and items chosen to smash. For example, at the Lose It Rage Room in Woodbridge, co-owned by Cody Nicholas, $60 provides 10 minutes to destroy $15 worth of glass objects, one medium item (laptop, monitor, radio, VCR), and one large item (chair, printer, speakers, table). Extravagant packages include a four-hour session to completely vandalize a car.
Leslie Rising and Ed Ware embarked on a trip to Norfolk’s Wunderful Release to shatter plates, vases, and glasses. “I definitely talked Ed into it,” admits Leslie. “Because the experience was so incongruent with our proper personalities, we couldn’t help but laugh the whole time.”
Elizabeth and Armi Blanton, parents of teen boys Charlie, 16, and Shep, 13, surprised their sons with a trip to Rage RVA for Charlie’s birthday. “We only have positive things to say,” Elizabeth says. “It was the perfect gift: permission to go wild and break things without getting in trouble.”
The Blanton boys agree that breaking glass is an ultimate thrill. “I felt so free,” Shep says. As both boys are avid baseball players, they soon figured out how to escalate their thrill by throwing bottles in the air to hit with their bat, as if going for home runs.
“That part made me a little nervous,” admits their mother, “not at the facility, which was very safe with full protective gear including face shield, coveralls, and gloves, but because they loved swinging their bat to hit bottles so much, I worried the idea might follow them home—but luckily that hasn’t been a problem.”
Some may question the psychological benefits of rage rooms, many which make claims like Wunderful Release as, “a safe place to destress for far less than your therapy sessions, and you won’t have to tell anyone your troubles.”
So, what do the experts say? “If it’s all in fun, there is no harm,” Pamela Byrnes, a pediatric mental health nurse practitioner at the University of Virginia Department of Child and Family Psychiatry, tells me. “More than anything else, these rooms are a novelty form of entertainment.”
Byrnes cautions people who are truly using an anger room as a therapeutic treatment. “In my professional role, I often hear about parents giving their children punching bags or encouraging them to hit a pillow when upset or angry. However, research shows that expressing anger through physical means, without incorporating regulation skills, can increase aggressive responses instead of reducing them,” she explains. For these reasons, Byrnes encourages the use of rage rooms in the name of fun over therapeutic treatment and appreciates that there is an age and parental consent requirement.
While Pope, the owner of The Destruction Room, admits he has no background as a psychiatric professional, he strongly endorses the emotional benefits. “All I can tell you is that people leave happier than when they came in, usually with giant smiles plastered across their faces.”
This article originally appeared in the April 2026 issue.
