There is a fairly simple rule in furniture design.
Humans choose the furniture.
Dogs learn to live with it.
For thousands of years, this arrangement has worked reasonably well — at least from our perspective.
But recently, we started wondering what would happen if the roles were reversed.
What if your Dachshund got to sit down with the furniture designer?
Actually, scratch that.
What if your Dachshund was the furniture designer?
As it turns out, we’d have some problems.
The Sofa Would Be About Two Inches Off the Ground
Let’s start with one of the Dachshund’s greatest grievances: the sofa.
To us, a beautiful sofa might have perfect proportions, wonderfully supportive cushions, gorgeous leather and elegant legs.
To a Dachshund, it is a mountain.
So our imaginary Dachshund designer made some improvements.
The legs are approximately one inch tall. The cushions are thin. The entire sofa sits barely above the floor.
The Dachshund can stroll onto it without jumping, climbing or requesting assistance.
It’s perfect.
Unfortunately, two humans now have to watch television with their knees somewhere around their ears.
This does not appear to concern the Dachshund.
After all, he wasn’t hired to design furniture for humans.
The Bed Gets an Elevator
Eventually, someone in the house apparently complained.
The sofa was one thing. They were not sleeping six inches off the floor.
So a compromise was reached.
The humans get their beautiful king-size bed at a perfectly normal height.
The Dachshund gets an elevator.
Not dog stairs.
Not a little plastic ramp hidden beside the nightstand.
A proper, beautifully integrated, push-button Dachshund elevator.
He steps onto the platform, presses the button with his paw, rises elegantly to mattress height and steps into bed.
Completely ridiculous?
Absolutely.
Would some Dachshund owners buy one tomorrow if it existed?
We’re not entirely convinced they wouldn’t.
Dinner Is Served — Please Take a Seat on the Floor
Things deteriorate again in the dining room.
Apparently our Dachshund designer believes everyone should be able to comfortably participate in dinner.
His solution is a magnificent dining table sitting barely above the floor.
It is beautifully made.
The food looks wonderful.
The wine is excellent.
The dinner party is going splendidly.
There is just one minor issue.
All the human guests are sitting cross-legged on the floor.
The Dachshund, naturally, has his own perfectly proportioned chair at the head of the table.
Somehow, he looks like the only person in the room who thinks the furniture is the correct size.
Technically, he is.
The Home Office Has a New CEO
Then we allowed him to redesign the office.
This was probably a mistake.
The executive desk is long, beautiful and approximately Dachshund height.
The humans conduct meetings from cushions on the floor, laptops balanced in front of them as they attempt to maintain some semblance of corporate dignity.
The Dachshund?
He has the executive chair.
Of course he does.
And looking at him sitting behind his enormous low desk, we’re beginning to suspect this was never really about furniture accessibility.
It was a hostile takeover.
Finally, Someone Fixed Patio Furniture
There are few things Dachshunds appreciate more than finding a warm patch of sunshine and occupying it for several hours.
Naturally, patio furniture required attention.
The redesigned loungers sit almost directly on the patio, eliminating that troublesome climb onto conventional outdoor furniture.
Humans now spend their afternoons essentially reclining on very expensive cushions placed several inches above the ground.
The Dachshund has his own perfectly proportioned lounger.
And umbrella.
Because apparently we’re running a resort now.
It’s Ridiculous. But There’s Something Behind the Joke.
Obviously, we’re not suggesting you let your Dachshund redesign your house.
Although after seeing the elevator, some of you are probably considering it.
But creating these ridiculous rooms made us think about something that isn’t particularly ridiculous at all.
Most furniture is designed for humans first and pets as an afterthought — if they’re considered at all.
When the furniture industry talks about pets, the conversation often revolves around performance fabrics.
Is the fabric stain resistant?
Can it handle muddy paws?
Will dog hair stick to it?
Can it survive claws?
Can we clean it easily?
Those are important questions.
But notice something about them.
They’re mostly questions about how our pets affect our furniture.
Maybe we should occasionally turn that around.
How does our furniture affect our pets?
Pet-Friendly Furniture Is About More Than Fabric
A sofa can be covered in the world’s greatest performance fabric and still be difficult for a small dog to climb onto.
A beautiful bed may be easy for a young dog to jump onto and considerably less practical several years later.
A chair might technically have enough room for you — but perhaps not enough room for the 70-pound dog who believes half of it belongs to him.
And outdoor furniture isn’t necessarily just for the people carrying cocktails onto the patio.
Our pets live in these spaces too.
They sleep on the sofa.
They sit beside us in chairs.
They stare through windows.
They nap beneath tables.
They follow us onto patios.
They find sunny spots, favourite corners and places where they can keep an eye on everything happening in the house.
In other words, they don’t merely live in our homes.
They live with us in them.
That distinction matters.
Maybe We’ve Been Looking at “Pet-Friendly” Backwards
There is an enormous market built around helping pets adapt to homes designed for humans.
Dog stairs.
Bed ramps.
Pet gates.
Protective covers.
Cat towers.
Furniture protectors.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of them.
But there’s another interesting question hiding underneath all of that:
Could the home itself occasionally meet the pet halfway?
That doesn’t mean installing a Dachshund elevator beside your bed.
It might simply mean thinking about seat height when choosing your next sofa.
Maybe it’s leaving enough room beside your favourite chair for the dog who always sleeps there.
Perhaps it’s choosing a bench beneath a window because your dog loves watching the neighbourhood.
It could mean arranging the living room so a large dog can comfortably move through it rather than navigating an obstacle course of coffee tables and accent chairs.
Or choosing patio furniture while remembering that four-legged members of the family will probably be using it too.
None of these decisions requires turning your home into a giant pet playground.
They’re simply part of designing around the people and animals who actually live there.
There’s a Marketing Lesson Here, Too
Furniture companies have spent years developing products that can withstand pets.
That’s valuable.
But there’s an opportunity to tell a much more interesting story than simply saying:
This sofa can survive your dog.
What about:
This sofa was designed knowing your dog lives here too.
That’s a very different message.
The first treats the pet as something the furniture needs protection from.
The second recognizes the pet as part of the household the furniture was created for.
For an industry selling furniture for family rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms and patios, that’s an important distinction.
Because the modern family sitting on the sofa doesn’t necessarily consist only of humans.
Sometimes there’s a Labrador taking up an entire cushion.
Sometimes there’s a cat sleeping across the back.
And sometimes there’s a Dachshund staring at a perfectly beautiful sofa wondering which idiot decided it needed six-inch legs.
The Best Homes Are Shared Homes
We joke a lot around here.
Clearly.
We just designed an executive office for a Dachshund.
But humour sometimes gives us permission to look at ordinary things from a different perspective.
Furniture isn’t simply something we put inside our homes.
It’s where life happens.
We eat around it.
We sleep on it.
We entertain friends on it.
We work from it.
We spend lazy Sunday afternoons on it.
And through almost all of those moments, our pets are somewhere nearby.
So perhaps “pet-friendly furniture” shouldn’t only mean furniture capable of surviving them.
Maybe it should occasionally mean furniture that works a little better for them.
We’re still not handing complete control of the furniture industry to Dachshunds.
We’ve seen what happens.
But maybe they deserve a seat at the design table.
Apparently We Shouldn’t Let the Dogs Near the Furniture Industry
The Dachshund experiment probably should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
We also handed an entire furniture workshop over to dogs to see what would happen if they became the carpenters, welders, upholsterers and other tradespeople behind the furniture itself.
See What If Dogs Made Furniture? 10 Canine Craftsmen We’d Probably Hire.
And because apparently we also can’t leave the bedroom industry alone, we assembled another highly questionable canine research panel to evaluate cooling, firmness, edge support, durability and exactly how much of a king-size mattress one Great Dane can occupy.
See We Asked Dogs to Test Luxury Mattresses. Their Standards Were Unreasonable..
