The title is self-explanatory. This is mainly for Marc and Ruth (Monty’s mom). I immediately thought of Ruth’s high walkway and platform and Marc’s forest of cat trees.
Two useful tags. Click either to see the articles: Toxic to cats | Dangers to cats
- Go to Stephan’s website. It is in German and he appears to be based in Germany.
- Associated: A house designed around the feline companion.
Please search using the search box at the top of the site. You are bound to find what you are looking for.
Useful tag. Click to see the articles: Cat behavior
i love that cat furniture if only could have something like that here my animals would love it. Im able to have cats both inside n outside. Its just so hard in a rental home as cant do the same thing.
Yes it’s hard in a rented home, we rent too, could never have those wonderful walkways inside but at least we can do what we like in the garden and it’s a nice big private one for our cats to enjoy.
You can ask the landlord if he’d allow you to put up something. It depends how long the tenancy agreement is. If it is long tenancy a landlord should allow you to put up screw fittings into walls etc. They are easy to repair afterwards.
1999 the year we moved here, sadly Bry died in 2000 but we had Ebby until 2007
There were lovely, solid British cats and I feel sad when you mention their deaths. It is one of the tough experiences we have to face as cat caretakers: the cat’s relatively short life. This is a nice photograph. It is very British if I may say so.
they are beautiful kitties always so hard to say goodbyes to beloeve cats hugs
They were both big beautiful cats and we still miss them
I think it’s wonderful all this furniture to enrich cats lives, I love Monty’s home made walkways, they look just as good as the Goldtatze range, in fact I think they are even better because they were made by Jeff, with love.
I love the pictures of all your planned furniture too Marc, it makes me wish we’d had this years ago when our first cats were young and for all the cats we’ve had since, they would have loved it. Although we’ve always had sheds and roofs and trees for our cats to enjoy sitting up a height outside, it would have been great to have inside very high places for them too.
Bryan and Ebony loved their ‘Watchtower’
Bryan and Ebony look so happy up there. Do Walt and Jo have access to the same spot? I loves reading about Walt and Jo climbing the curtains when they were younger. Monty seemed to he trying to do that again the other day, but he is just too big now, it wasn’t working and his claw just kept getting stuck in the curtain. That was before his indoor playground was done. Now he doesn’t need to climb the curtain to get up high.
No sadly the Watchtower has long gone but Walt and Jo have the Catnasium to the wash house roof and the new fencing at the back of our garden now too which is very stable and they can launch up the trees from.
Like Monty our boyz are too big to climb the curtains now too, just as well as they’d pull them down lol
That’s what I was thinking– I was glad he couldn’t get up onto it climbing, because he probably would have pulled the whole curtain down.
That was my thought too. You can’t beat homemade with love. You have embraced the idea of cat furniture to make the home for cats and people and not just people. I love that.
I have this dream that house builders should provide an option to buyers who care for cats that includes designs such as ramps, perching areas, enclosures and cat-flaps etc.. Built-in modification from the beginning.
What a lovely photo of Bryan and Ebony. Eb was a big cat wasn’t she – bigger than Bryan by the looks of it which is unusual since she was a lady and he was a boy.
Can I suggest everybody look at my FB album on cat furniture:
https://www.facebook.com/lillibilli/media_set?set=a.10150312502854256.412393.559199255&type=3
I love this kind of thing. I have all kinds of plans for my place too. 🙂
Just had a look and they are the best, and best designed I have seen. There is some first class designs in cat furniture nowadays. I’d love to have that sort of stuff. You need to right sort of home for some of it. Large opens space would seem to be important. Thanks for picking these items out.
Michael no problem. Actually I can suggest a very good site for contemporary cat furniture – it’s: http://www.hauspanther.com/
They have tons of great things in there for all tastes. Furniture, toys and food – everything really.
Sorry for yet another link – but I thought it was worth it to put it.
I love good, well designed cat furniture as it modifies the human home to make it a home shared between cat and human.
Thanks for exhibiting the excellent “Interior Decorations” for a cats accommodation.Such a arrangement is possible in Europe and America with its huge Bungalow houses and definitely not possible in apartment flats.As for my cats, they jump and prowl all over my small flat including the computer.As observed, cats love sitting on high places in the house.
Your cats find higher places naturally without this sort of furniture. I agree, you need a large interior space with high ceilings make this work really well. In the right home this looks great provided the owner of the house doesn’t mind a totally unconventional appearance.
Jeff and I are pretty unconventional as it is, so it works for us. And this is as much Monty’s house as it is our house.
Monty doesn’t like how the suspension bridges are able to bounce a little. It scares him. My Aunt Dianne said she really hates that kind of bridge because it scares her walking on a surface that can move and sway. I would suggest maybe going with planks between suspended boxes instead of the suspension bridges for someone attempting to build this, or if ordering these, try a short bridge first and see if your cat will take to it. I would think if you order them you could add carpet over the bridges if you’d want to, but I would double check. Our bridges were made with wire cable. Rope can stretch over time, and maybe the carpet would add too much weight. I wish we could have made one of those hanging baskets, but they looked kind of involved– you’d need to sew to attach the basket. We just didn’t try it. Too bad we can’t order one for Monty. I’ve seen people make hammocks for their cats in an upper corner of a room. Again, we didn’t feel like getting out the sewing machine. But there are so many possibilities of things you can buy or make to allow your cat to have a whole new indoor world to explore. Kind of a must in a climate where a third of the year it’s too cold to go out, and another third it’s too hot and humid. Monty actually refused outside time on a relatively warm and snow free day to play on his indoor jungle gym.
Your thinking about making the home very cat friendly is spot on. I love it. Especially, as you say, the weather makes for a lot more indoor living than usual and Monty hates the cold.
I would love to have this sort of set up at my home but (a) my flat is too small – Rudolph makes this point for his flat in Mumbai and (b) Charlie has three legs and is no where near mobile enough. Also he is pretty old. He can jump up but hardly jump down and walking is ungainly and tricky.
I think any size flat can accommodate these, but I wondered about how safe Charlie would be up there with three legs. Cats can access their walkways from a series of shelves, or a ramp or even a tall scratching post to climb up and down. After that everything is up high and out of the way. Our house is very small by American standards, but if we wanted to we could add some elevated spaces for Monty in almost every room.
Ruth you are right – a solid bridge is better!
The suspension bridges are very attractive and the site pictures cats using them. In real life they are a bit of a tough sell for your cat. He’s not going to take to them naturally. We are probably definitely going to need to add another suspended box to break up the longest bridge. Monty will traverse the short bridge, but the long one is just too much for him.
Monty’s walkways were based from these. We found a site from Germany. In Europe you can probably purchase them. We weren’t sure if we could get them here and even if we could shipping would have been prohibitively expensive. So Jeff looked at the pictures and came up with some things. Monty’s suspension bridges have cable on the side of them instead of rope. And of course, anything like this, you are custom making it to your space. I’ve seen these done with planks, but never with suspension bridges before. My husband was intrigued, so he built some for Monty. Jeff says he tolerates Monty but that he doesn’t love him. I can’t believe that since he gave up an entire day and part of the next to build Monty a suspended kingdom in our back room. Monty currently will run across the smaller suspension bridge, but he won’t walk on the longer one. We are going to try carpeting the bridges, to give his claws more to grip and make him feel more secure. The middle of the longer bridge is right in line with the vent from our forced air furnace. It gets nice and warm right there. I’m hoping with the addition of carpet Monty will find it a cozy play to nap, but we shall see.
Hi Ruth, I wondered whether you were inspired by these German feline walkways. I am very impressed with your husband who has built the walkway and platform. As you say, I think he likes Monty more than he admits and he certainly loves you and so he should ;).
I think Monty is right about the mobile nature (wobbly) of the walkways. They look great, like something from a Harrison Ford movie but the tree dwelling cats are used to branches which are pretty solid. The inherent climbing skills of the wild cat ancestors of the domestic cat are based around trees and more solid structures.
The carpet will probably help a lot. A continuous carpet joining the units together would also stabilise it somewhat and reduce the wobbliness. A last resort might be to place a support underneath to convert it to a solid structure.
I am very impressed though. Monty is a lucky boy.
Another option could be two vertical cables from the center of the walkway to the ceiling. That would shore it up without changing the appearance of the walkway as a suspension bridge. The shorter the suspension bridge the less it can bounce. By putting a support in the center you shorten it by half, which should make it very stable. I’ll run that idea by Jeff. He may or may not agree. It’s been fun creating it together, but really it’s all been made possible by my husband’s carpentry skills and creativity. He has always been creative.
My wedding ring is a one of a kind which he designed. The jeweler first made a wax mold of the design. Jeff rejected the first one, made a few changes and the second one was the one he went with. At the time I was very surprised, but today I know how creative he is.
When we shoot fireworks shows he really knows how to plan an attractive, safe and fun show. The summer camp show we do is donated by us and our friends so Jeff gets complete leeway on what we can do. It’s always amazing.
He also puts things up on the bulletin boards in the coffee time room at church. He just decided one day to start putting something up in there, to dress it up. It’s an unused classroom where we have coffee and donuts after church. I teach for a living, but his bulletin boards are better than what I would have come up with.
I used to think we weren’t very alike at all because I like to write and he hates that. But we’re both creative, just in different ways. God knew what He was doing when he put us together. Monty is a nice addition to our family also. Jeff has really bonded with him, though he won’t admit it. His motivation to get out of bed in the morning is that Monty is waiting for some attention from him– so he gets up early enough to pet and play with Monty for awhile.
That is a good idea to shorten the span so it wobbles less. I’ll see if I can put the video of Monty on tonight.