Citizen Canine Dog Forum

[Carol S]

Animal house: The furniture is exotic, showers are oversized and beds plush to meet the design standards of these canine kings and kitty cats

Kathryn Young
For CanWest News Service


August 21, 2005


Here is a tail of the uber-mutt in design: folks who love their cats and dogs enough to tailor houses and furniture with their needs in mind.

While most of us Homo sapiens will never get to live in a house designed specifically for us, handfuls of lucky pets do -- and we're not talking the doghouse but rather the main human home.

Special floors and doors, coatings on stairs, hot and cold running hose bibs to wash muddy paws, fish tanks built into niches and used as room dividers, wide south-facing window ledges for cat-napping, dedicated doggy showers, protected dog runs, and training rooms in the basement have all been designed by some Canadian architects.

And if pet owners want to take it a step further, they can buy custom-designed pet furniture. Avery of Awes is a pet-oriented shop that opened in Hudson, Que., in early July, housing a dozen prototype pet beds shaped as pool tables, jester hats, thrones, sinks and even a TV with a real dial and old rabbit ears on top.

"People come in with their dogs and take pictures on the beds," said Kelley Wilkie, whose husband Avery Wilkie makes whatever customers want.

Over the past five years, he's made beds shaped like sardine and tuna cans, a hockey rink, a Mack truck and more. The Jester bed has bells hanging from coiled springs on the headboard shaped like a jester's hat.

The Pharaoh line is the basic model, a relatively simple box on feet with a brocade-covered memory-foam reversible pad for $375.

The cost of features designed into homes is less easy to pinpoint. In a home designed by architect Linda Chapman, the cost of the built-in dog-proof feeding station for the felines and a special access hole to the litter box were absorbed into the construction cost, said owner Kathleen Pickard.

"For us, it's the combination (of cats and dogs) that required the feeding station," she says, "because our dogs will steal the cats' food otherwise."

Custom-built by Deslaurier Custom Cabinets, one of the lower kitchen cabinets has a trimmed hole in the cherry panel so Captain and Smudge can get in to eat, but their large canine friends can't. Their humans simply open the cabinet door to replenish the food supply.

Pickard's husband, Arthur Ham, measured the cats to ensure the hole was large enough, but not too large.

Access to the litter box is another challenge cat owners face. Captain and Smudge's latrine was to go in the mechanical room behind the stairs but their owners didn't want the door left open all the time. So, they had an access hole cut just under the stairs in the front entryway.

"It works really well because under the stairs is dead space," said Pickard. "It's a conversation piece."

Designing pet-friendly homes isn't something architects do every day, but enough people have come to Christopher Simmonds that he's starting to develop an expertise -- learning, for example, that slate floors are better than smooth tile so dogs can get a grip.

And a product called Shark Grit is excellent on slippery wood stair treads to create traction for older dogs. Shark Grit contains fine particles of carbon fibre that you paint on the stairs for safety, also preventing wear from the dog's nails.

That same design-award-winning home, called the Courtyard House, also has a fenced area beside the back porch for a dog run. The porch has hot and cold water taps and the adjacent mudroom purposely didn't have radiant heating in the floor so it stayed cool for the dog.

Learning about pet needs has been an education for Simmonds, who didn't grow up with pets. But as clients have made requests, he's added to his knowledge base. Washing a big dog, for example, requires a large area that can get wet.

"I understand it's a difficult task and that you'd want to be outside," says Simmonds. It was architect David Mailing who planned a dedicated doggy shower off the laundry room of a large country home. When the two huge Newfoundland dogs come in, their paws get rinsed in the 1.2-metre shower, which has an adjustable hand-held sprayer and a tub spout.

"People with dogs demand a proper back door (rather than a sliding door off a family room or eating area)," says Mailing. "That's not sufficient because dogs need a dry-off area, a place to catch the muddy paws."

Mailing has also designed walls with fish tanks as partitions.

Simmonds has had to overcome other pet-related design problems his clients present to him -- like the dogs that could open doors with lever handles. He found some European lever handles with stiff springs they couldn't open.

Or the dogs that would chew apart dining room chairs in their agitation when a small beeping sound on the smoke alarm indicated the battery needed replacing. When the owners were designing a new house, they wanted an alarm system with no sounds to irritate the dogs.

Simmonds has put the main vent of an HRV (heat recovery ventilator) in the mudroom so smells and sweat were contained, direct access from a master bedroom to the mudroom so the owners could easily let the dogs out, designed an area for the dogs' many medals and ribbons to be displayed, and an indoor training room in the basement with thick rubber exercise mats where dogs could go over their jumps.

One set of blueprints he drew up showed three large ellipses along one side of the master bedroom, confusing people who looked at the plans. The ellipses indicated dog beds for the three standard poodles.

Pickard and Ham chose engineered hardwood flooring and maple stairs because they're tough enough to take dog and cat nails as the pets race around -- and also their two boys' roughhousing.

Mailing doesn't have any bird or reptile designs in his repertoire, but he has heard of an indoor pool specifically designed for horses.

"You never know how far people will go."

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[Leopold]

I am wondering if we fall into this category...

- We have put in a cat bathroom, well actually it is a closet that has a cat door on it with a light for the litter boxes...(Litter is a delicacy for Leo)
- The cats have their own room with their beds and cat trees and food, closed off with a baby gate that they can fit under but not the big lug
....(Leo loves their food)
-A huge dog bed is a major fixture in our living room, even though it does nothing for the decor...
- Not to mention the bathroom in the basement is deemed the animal bathroom, where bathing of the cats and dog take place as well as the cleaning of litter boxes...

Okay our tweeking with design is more out of necessity than comfort...but I do tell you the cats are pretty comfy in their room on their comfy beds, sticking out their tounges at Leo from the other side of the gate

Krista
_________________
"We give dogs a little time, a little space, and a little love,
and in return they give us their all.
It's the best deal mankind has ever made"
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