Melbourne’s Never Too Small, known for their beautifully produced videos about small footprint living, recently curated a new exhibition as part of Melbourne Design Week. “Multifunctional Pet Furniture” featured 11 different pieces of furniture designed by an international cohort of architects and designers. Each piece was made locally with plywood thanks to Castlemaine-based makers Jem Selig Freeman and Laura Woodward from Like Butter and exhibited at Never Too Small’s offices in Collingwood.
“There’s a hard rubbish room in my apartment building,” explains Colin in the exhibition precis. “People often discard pet houses or furniture and it [made] 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. 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.”
With “Multifunctional Pet Furniture”, Colin decided to explore the problem and, in particular: “how pet houses might be better designed for small apartments, and how they could be made to last longer and serve multiple functions”. He invited 11 designers (connections made during his trips around the world to film Never Too Small videos) to send through specifications of a design could be constructed from CNC-machined plywood.
The resulting designs are delightful. One of the most memorable is CavyHaus designed by maker Like Butter, which is a series of shelves with a guinea pig cage as one or two of its levels. Other designs are not only multifunctional, but also transformable: Spanish collective tra.ma designed Dogpod, a convertible bed that can also be folded in to form an open box or turned over to form a table. One design even includes a dangling cat toy – this is Danish practice Studiomama‘s Pet-Level, a chair with a cat bed underneath the seat and an armchair that’s also a shelf perfect for a seated cat.
Then there’s The Kitty Cabin, a swivel desk by Matthew Reynolds of Australian studio Mattr.Studio with two cat beds stacked underneath, Doggy Lounge, a kennel with sloping sides for resting on by Tsai Design, Pepas’ Palace, which is a kennel with a brightly coloured ramp by Mariana de Delás and Mylo, a dog bed made of two boxes that slot together designed by Three-d Conceptwerke principal designer Dess Chew for a dog that likes to sleep under chairs.
Finally, there’s Slaaptafel, a cat bed under a table by Koen Fraijman and PupCup, a cup-shaped bed by Studio Edwards. And, one of the most transformable, and colourful, is Shiro, a kennel, box and table designed by Colin Chee himself and his childhood friend Yee Keong Leong from Bid Studio Architects in Malaysia and named after Colin’s dog.
What makes this show outstanding is not only its international focus, but its practicality – in setting the brief, the curators have really thought about what people living in small spaces might need, especially with pet ownership so popular, and created an economical and sustainable way to address the problem. It’s also creative and a lot of fun.
“Multifunctional Pet Furniture” works were made with the help of plywood sponsor Plyco, CNC sponsor Like Butter and paint sponsor Dulux. The show was developed in support of The Logs Dogs Home.
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