Pet furniture gets a much-needed shake-up in Never Too Small’s ‘Multifunctional Pet Furniture for Small Space Living’ exhibition, with a band of international designers injecting playfulness, flexibility and longevity into the homes within our homes for our pets.
I’ve never met a cat tree that I liked. Admittedly I’m a dog person, but still, whenever I’ve seen a cat tree in someone’s home it’s always raised questions in my mind about the owner’s life choices. They are so bulky and so ugly. Why would anyone give over so much real estate in their home to something so charmless? Because they love their cats, of course. And presumably they want their cats to have a place to play and perch and perv on the neighbours from, along with something to scratch other than the sofa they’ve already reupholstered twice. Surely we can do better than the cat tree though? If we love our pets so much, surely we can explore more creative and appealing ways of integrating their needs into our homes?
It was this line of thinking that motivated Colin Chee, Never Too Small’s creative director, to instigate and curate Multifunctional Pet Furniture for Small Space Living as part of Melbourne Design Week 2024. Colin’s interest in the subject is multifaceted: he lives in a small apartment with his Japanese Spitz, Shiro, and has long failed to find a suitable piece of furniture that Shiro could call his own. He also observed a disturbing trend in his apartment building that suggested he wasn’t alone in being disappointed by what was on offer.
“There's a hard rubbish room in my apartment building where I often poke in my head to see what furniture or white goods residents throw away every time I take my rubbish to the bin. I noticed that people often discard pet houses or furniture and it makes me wonder if their pets passed away or if they simply didn't use the pet house and found it too bulky for their apartment,” says Colin.
“It's disheartening to see that 90 percent of the time, these pet houses are still in perfect or near-new condition, leading to a significant waste of materials.”
Australia has one of the highest pet ownership rates in the world: nearly two-thirds of Australians share their homes with beloved pets. In Melbourne’s urban centre, the number of people living with pets has increased by 50 percent in the last four years. In an era where an increasing number of us are living in small apartments, Colin was keen to explore how pet owners might be better empowered to carve out a dedicated sanctuary for their beloved pets without compromising on their own living space and design sensibilities.
Colin and the Never Too Small team invited 11 international designers to design a prototype for a piece of multifunctional pet furniture from a single piece of plywood. As well as investigating designs for pet furniture better suited to compact living spaces, Colin’s motivations were also to interrogate how a piece of furniture that is so often single-use could remain desirable and useful even after a pet dies or moves on.
The designs were all templated and cut out using CNC machinery courtesy of presenting partner LikeButter and hand finished by Colin in Never Too Small’s studio. Ranging from a shelving system and bench seat with a multistorey home for guinea pigs to a generous dog bed that can be flipped and folded to form a bench seat, table or additional storage, the designs are not only highly practical but playful and covetable too. A far cry from your average cat tree.
Multifunctional Pet Furniture for Small Space Living was presented by Never Too Small and LikeButter as part of Melbourne Design Week 2024. Plyco and Dulux were event sponsors and some of the pieces were auctioned off with proceeds shared with Lost Dogs Home.
