Once upon a time, pets had to make do with a kennel in the corner, a stringy old bed or a spot between your legs on the sofa. Luna’s litter box was an eyesore you learnt to live with. Cookie’s bed certainly didn’t influence your choice of upholstery. You’d plan a playroom for the kids, but the dog definitely wasn’t on the interior designer’s mood board.
Cut to 2026. Leo has his own teakwood sofa. The cat has a bespoke climbing wall and play area. From Victorian-style loungers to solid pinewood platform beds, if there’s a piece of furniture humans can enjoy, someone’s making a pet-sized version.
Pets are now part of the family, says Upneet Kaur, co-founder of Bunt India, a designer pet-furniture brand. “Many couples don’t want kids, and treat pets like their babies.” Which means homes are designed keeping pet behaviours and needs in mind. The furniture comes in premium wood, rattan, luxe upholstery and sculptural designs that wouldn’t look out of place in a high-end living room. Some of it is even nicer than what humans own. Take a look:
No ruff edges
Mehfooz Abbasi and Anam Taufik launched Furmaish in 2024, after adopting their indie kitty, Meowth. “My husband and I kept looking for pet products that would fit the aesthetic of our home. Everything available was two-colour and plasticky.” They began designing home décor that worked both for the animal’s needs and the human’s need for a beautiful home.
{{/usCountry}}Mehfooz Abbasi and Anam Taufik launched Furmaish in 2024, after adopting their indie kitty, Meowth. “My husband and I kept looking for pet products that would fit the aesthetic of our home. Everything available was two-colour and plasticky.” They began designing home décor that worked both for the animal’s needs and the human’s need for a beautiful home.
{{/usCountry}}The Chicloo, for instance, is a wooden drawer, with a neat little space for cat litter and a tray tucked inside. It looks nothing like a conventional litter box. They’ve also created an elegant scratch stand that attaches to the side of a sofa, protecting upholstery from feline clawing. It comes with a little space for your coffee cup – for the human, not the cat.
The Flamingo Life, which creates bespoke luxury furniture, has been inundated with requests for pets’ beds to match their home’s sleeping arrangements. “If someone has a complete teakwood bed with wooden coffee tables, they want their chihuahua’s bed to be the same,” says co-founder Shambhavi. They now have a pet-bed line, with rattan-weave beds and teakwood loungers. In May, furniture company Ucuoro introduced pet furniture that would fit right into the pages of a design magazine. There were ’70s-inspired sculptural sofas, loungers and stools. Even Ikea has adapted its Klippan sofa – originally meant for humans – into a pet-sized version, and sells pet beds in minimalist colour palettes.
Off the leash
One reason pet furniture has gone high-end is because apartments are getting smaller. Owners want products to blend into their carefully curated homes rather than stick out like sore paws. Furmaish’s Pawndulum is a sleek wall clock that’s also a cat-scratcher. Bunt’s Nook is a coffee-table-meets-pet-bed designed to fit into bedrooms or living rooms. Cats, and smaller dog breeds such as Shih Tzus, love curling up in it. “You can place it wherever you spend the most time and want your pet to be with you,” says Kaur. Brands such as Furry Living, meanwhile, make living-room décor that doubles as pet hangout spots: Think TV cabinets with snug cubbyholes and side tables with perches for pets.
There’s more to designing pet furniture than shrinking a human sofa and throwing in a cushion. “The biggest challenge is not to humanise pet products,” says Dr Barbara Schäfer, a veterinarian and product-risk assessment expert at Ikea. “It’s important to use animals’ natural needs and behaviours, like how they sleep, eat or play, as starting points.”
Abbasi admits this involved plenty of trial and error. “The cat furniture we’ve made worked amazingly, but dog furniture didn’t. Dogs usually sit with their parents, on the couch or the bed. They don’t like sitting separately. Cats, on the other hand, are independent. They want their space and those cosy little beds.”
Bunt seems to have cracked the code with its bestselling dog-furniture piece: The Couch. It’s a Victorian-style mini-sofa with a pinewood frame upholstered in heavy-duty leatherette. It looks just like a human couch, except it’s smaller, easier to clean and water-resistant. It’s designed with India’s popular breeds (Labradors, Golden Retrievers, German Shepherds and Cocker Spaniels) in mind. But it works because it’s something both humans and dogs can use. “You would never sit on their floor cushion with your dogs, and they know that. But this couch is something you both can chill on together,” says Kaur.
Lap of luxury
Pet furniture also has to survive muddy paws, shedding, scratching, the occasional accident and, particularly in India, the heat. Abbasi says it took them a while to get the materials right. “Imported pet beds aren’t meant for Indian weather. We need materials that don’t let a lot of heat build up,” she says. They experimented with straw, but settled on nanotech fabrics for dog beds, because they resist stains and are waterproof. Cats, on the other hand, love sitting on and scratching jute and sisal, so those make it to cat furniture.
At The Flamingo Life the bedding is all cotton, and bouclé, a textured yarn with a nubby surface that pets love to scratch, says Shambhavi. The fabrics also need to score a high Martindale rating – a measure of a fabric’s resistance to friction – so they can withstand all that scratching. Kaur designs most of Bunt’s pieces to sit closer to the floor because “aged dogs can’t climb onto a higher platform”. The fabrics are easy to brush fur off, and aren’t necessarily marketed as pet-specific. Human customers respond better when they hear that everything, from the wood and stainless-steel frames to the fabrics, cushioning, foam, glue and stitching, meets the same standards as human furniture. That means prices often start at ₹10K, going up to ₹40K apiece. “Most parents don’t mind shelling out ₹20,000 on a well-made piece of furniture,” says Kaur. Why should Momo settle for less?
From HT Brunch, November 14, 2026
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