Pet Sounds

Hi there, hello and thank you for tuning in today. This episode is going to be so much fun as we are talking all about designing your home for and around your pets, and even if you are pet-free this is a great episode to help you think about durability, to learn about performance fabrics, and to think about what inspires you. You know, one of my rituals to get set up to record this podcast is to make sure the my cat Ramona is fed, comfortable, and preferably napping; because if she hears me talking to you she usually wants to join the conversation and it can be a little distracting. But that being said, my pet is a huge part of my world, and for a creature that is home more than I am, it’s important to create an environment that is supportive to her, while still looking like a human’s home and not a doggy daycare. It’s also important to create an environment that can withstand the extra wear our pets can put on our homes, from the floors to the upholstery. But my favorite element of designing a home with pets is to actually take inspiration from the pets themselves to create design concepts through colors, textures, and personality. If you’re a pet owner, you know they are the center of our worlds, so why not celebrate it?

Whether you’re a dog mom, a cat daddy, or an Iguana Mama, having a pet is such a great way to enrich our lives. Caring for a living creature is an important way that we humans connect with nature, and we all know connecting with nature is part of self-care. 

I want to start by covering some of the super basic, practical, almost obvious areas that are dedicated to your pet. These are the spaces that are all about daily life with an animal. When you think about the feeding areas - metal bowls placed on the ground for everyone trip over and step in. These areas can be notoriously messy, but they can actually be made into very nice looking vignettes with the right styling. Firstly, it helps to use bowls that are elevated off the ground, not only because this it is easier on our loved ones necks, but also because this actually makes the whole feeding station look more refined and elegant by adding height and elongation. Etsy has some super cute bowl options, there’s also a great website called Happy and Polly that has fun accessories, including elevated bowls, or you can do the easiest DIY ever and glue the bottoms of two medium ceramic bowls together for a chic hourglass shape. This should be done for both food and water bowls, but what really ties everything together is to put the dinnerware on a tray. This may sound excessive, but it actually helps contain runaway food bits and makes the whole set up look intentional and very cute. Alternatively, cabinet designers like Dearborn Studio integrate feeding areas into the very bottom drawer in a kitchen drawer stack - pull it out when your pet is eating, and close it up when they aren’t - completely seamless.

Moving on, if you walk your pet, make sure to add a special hook in your coat closet or where you hang your keys for a leash and harness if you use one. Having a dedicated hook will help keep the leash easy to find and out of the way. If you have a cat with a litter box, placement is everything. Choose somewhere that is private and out of the way. Laundry rooms, mud rooms, storage rooms, and even bathrooms are great options, and if you’re working with limited space, a dedicated coat closet is a great place to hide it. Make sure to give the area around the box lots of breathing room and put down some grippy rubber mats to help collect excess litter. There are also litter boxes that can be disguised as furniture like credenzas, side tables, and even potted plants. This can help them blend into their surroundings even if it is in a secondary space like a laundry room, plus these units are typically quite large, hiding the litter box deep within the confines of a bookshelf or the like, giving your cat more privacy. 

If you’re a new pet owner, when you first bring an animal into your home, you may start to see the landscape of your walls and furniture in a new way. What used to seem like a regular sofa on legs transforms into an elaborate fort for hiding furry creatures who aren’t ready to socialize yet.  Whether we help create them or not, our animal companions will find places to call their own that may be surprising. Inside kitchen cabinets, on window sills, dresser drawers, closet shelves, and chair backs all become perches, lookout posts, and caves. This can be charming, but what can cause a little chaos is when these newly found post-up locations aren’t on our radar and we can’t actually find our pets, even if only for a minute. It can also be frustrating when the chosen hang-out of our pets happens to be a brand new sofa or ottoman that we are trying to keep clean and for human use mostly.

I’m a big fan of cat aficionado Jackson Galaxy and his strategy for controlling where pets do and do not hang out is a really great one - anytime you are trying to discourage a behavior, whether its sleeping in your sock drawer or scratching the side of the sofa, another option has to be presented that will satisfy the pet. So rather than just saying no and taking something away, give them a better option. 

With this in mind, it can be really helpful to give our pets their own dedicated pieces of furniture, whether its a dog bed, a cat tree, or a perch for your parakeet. In the last ten years pet furniture has really come a long way in terms of design aesthetic. Shops likes Etsy and Chewy.com have incredible designer pieces that can be incognito looking like a mid century modern side table, adorable tiny homes, or gorgeous sculptural works of art. Even companies like Target, Crate and Barrel, and Wayfair have gotten into the furniture world. And if you’re looking specifically for doggy beds, these are becoming the accessory du jour for the many modern mattress companies that advertise all over social media and podcasts, like Avocado and Casper.

Another example of providing a better option when trying to discourage a behavior, my old cat BJ, rest his soul, scratched the living daylights out of my wingback lounge chair. I’m talking down to the wood frame and then he started scratching that up too. I had the chair reupholstered, but what really stopped him from going back to it was providing lots of cardboard scratch pads near his favorite spots. This allowed him an easy, more accessible option to scratch his heart out, he basically forgot about the chair.

No matter what kind of pet you have, the fabrics in our homes are particularly vulnerable to staining, scratching, and ripping. This proves to be a challenge with upholstered items like sofas and chairs because they are a pain to replace or clean. Enter performance fabrics. The players in the durable fabric game have gotten strong since the days of hot vinyl car seats. There are so many brands of fabric that have proprietary recipes for stain resistant coatings and backings. Many of these are hospital quality, meaning they can be wiped down with bleach, but they have the look and feel of linen, woven tweed, soft cotton, even leather look-a-likes. Brand names to look for include Crypton, Gore-tex (who also makes waterproof outdoor apparel), Nanotex, Prefixx, Sta-Kleen, and Alta. Although, as I mentioned in the episode all about an easy to clean home called “So Fresh and So Clean,” most retailers have their own branded terminology, so look for terms like “stain repellant” and “water resistant”. Crypton in particular is especially great for pets - this is top secret technology for fabric that not only makes liquid run right off like it’s made of plastic, but it can also self heal from small punctures like pens and - hey, pet claws. But the fabric itself has a soft, textile feel to it.

One term you may have floating around in the back of your mind is Scotchguard. This is a spray on finish from scotch tape and Command Hook maker 3M, (short for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company) and it has an interesting history to it. This coating was discovered in 1952 and widely used to help prevent stains on furniture. But in 1999 the EPA opened an investigation into the ingredients used in Scotchguard, specifically perfluorooctainesulfonmide - which I likely mispronounced so we will go with PFOSA. This is a type of persistent organic pollutant, or what some people have termed “forever chemicals” meaning these chemicals do not breakdown overtime or decompose, and their accumulation on the planet has been identified by the EPA as having effects on both human and environmental health. The following year, 3M voluntarily phased out the majority of Scotchguard  products, stating to the New York Times that while they felt the ingredients were safe, some ingredients were  persistent “like a rock” and never decompose. In 2003 Scotchguard relaunched with new, completely reformulated chemistry. The company was ambitious to get back to being a household staple, but never really regained the glory it once knew. I personally don’t have much experience using Scotchguard, but I do know that it’s iconic namesake describes what most performance fabric treatments aim to do. It’s almost a synecdochelike Kleenex or Band-aid.

There have been rumblings about other performance fabric coatings needing to be reformulated to be less harmful to the environment, all this to say that the balance between durability and sustainability in our fabrics and building materials is one that is being continually reconfigured behind the scenes.

Off the sofa and on to the floor! Flooring choices are critical when it comes to owning a pet, and if you want an in-depth discussion of all the possibilities of flooring for your home, no matter what your goals are, head over to Katharine MacPhail’s podcast called Talking Home Renovations with The House Maven. A few weeks ago Catharine and I had a great discussion on flooring. But specifically with pets, I sound like a broken record, but porcelain tile and carpet tile are really your best friends. I talk all about carpet tiles in my episode called “Magic Carpet Ride”, you should definitely have a listen to that one if you missed it. But with porcelain floor tile, you are getting a surface that is strong, wipeable, and can look like almost anything - any color, can be matte, glossy, small tiles, large tiles, you name it. Porcelain tiles can get wet and they won’t discolor. It’s not to say that you can’t have a certain flooring type with pets, like for instance hardwood floors, but it’s just going to be more difficult to clean. Wood is definitely not moisture friendly and claws can easily leave scratch marks in even the hardest woods.

Now that covers the majority of practical and performance focused things. Let’s talk about some more fun ways we can let our spaces be inspired by our animals friends. When considering a color palette for a space, a critical step is to factor in all of the elements that are already there, flooring, cabinets, anything that is staying and won’t be changed. This includes pets. Consider including colors from the fur, paws, eyes, nose, and ears into your homes color scheme. You can even get inspired by patterns on their fur like stripes, spots, brindle, and gradients. For instance, my cat Ramona is a calico, so her color scheme is black, white, camel, with light pink accents. This might all sound a little whacky, but if you love your pets, designing with them in mind comes naturally. It’s not that different from the whole bringing the outside in concept with lots of greenery, palm patterned wallpaper, and house plants. 

Another fun detail that can really bring a moment of delight into your home is to curate a pet portrait gallery wall. You may have a collection of photographs of your pet, I for some reason have tons of paintings that I have been gifted and also one I painted myself of my cats, and they look really cool clustered together. It’s fun to see different variations on a theme as a form of decor.

You’ve made it to the end my dear, thank you so much for joining me today, it was so fun to share some tips an ideas about two of my favorite things - interior design and pets. If you are enjoying this podcast you can share it with a friend who you think would like it too, you can follow me on Instagram @softlandingpodcast, and you can find full transcripts of this and many other episodes on my website softlandingstudio.com I hope you have a fantastic day, you are doing an amazing job, I see you. And I will talk to you next time.