We’re So Ready to Move Into These Mini Pet Rooms

There was a time when a pet-friendly home meant stain-resistant floors and non-toxic cleaning supplies. Now, it could be used to describe a new phenomenon in interior design: Pet rooms. Videos and images of these miniature rooms started popping up on my For You page a few months ago, and every day since then I’m grateful that the TikTok algorithm knows me better than I know myself. These days, pet rooms are becoming more and more popular for people who are looking for both a creative outlet and a truly useful space. And I, of course, had to know how owners were actually putting them together.

Peaches, Challah, and Mitzi are the design-obsessed dogs of Benjamin Mazer, an Atlanta-based ER doctor. As fans of midcentury-modern decor, their living room features clean lines and geometric shapes, plenty of large windows to bring the outside world in, and a generous collection of houseplants. Peaches, Challah, and Mitzi got enough teak- and walnut-inspired accents to make Charles and Ray Eames proud, and, as patrons of the arts, they’re constantly shuffling around their collection of atomic-era prints and paintings. On any given day, you may find all three of them kicking back and watching TV on their curved blue velvet loveseat or their mustard sofa, with a gold bar cart just a few steps away for when night hits.

Challah is a long-haired, black miniature dachshund, Peaches is a smooth coat miniature dachshund, and the youngest (and smallest), Mitzi, is a piebald miniature dachshund. Just like the three pups, their living room is also miniature—and all designed by Benjamin.

Like so many things, their room started from a practical need. “I kept worrying about them when I wasn’t home,” Benjamin says. When Peaches was young, she needed surgery for a herniated disc that she got from jumping off of human-sized furniture. “It was initially very casual,” Benjamin explains. “My goal was to just put them in a room with some dog beds and make it their room.” Then, he found dog sofas on Wayfair. “That’s what sparked this whole creative thing, and it just went out of control to what it is now,” he adds.

These days, the room is more like a living art project, which Benjamin reasonably calls The Mini Living Room and shares on TikTok and Instagram. All of the furniture in the room is the perfect size for three low-rider dogs, and the scale blends flawlessly with all the other pieces and the space.

“People lose their minds without being able to see the scale of the room,” Benjamin says. Viewers will comment on his videos asking if everything is the size of a dollhouse, or if they’re actually in a ballroom. “Your mind has a perceptual crisis,” he explains. In some videos, he’s tried to show exactly how big everything is, placing things like bananas and shoes on the couch and tables. “But then everyone said now they just look like huge bananas,” he adds.

The trick to understanding The Mini Living Room is knowing that most of the objects are actually people-sized things, just put to use differently. For example, the round wood end table is actually a cake stand, and the floor lamps placed throughout the room were originally intended to be desk lamps for people. The coffee tables are charcuterie platters, and the bar cart is a vanity shelf from Target. “Once I explain this process to other people, they can’t stop seeing things like a miniature version of other things,” Benjamin notes.

Still, not everything in the room follows this method. Benjamin also makes a lot of the furniture from things he finds at stores like HomeGoods, TJ Maxx, or Marshalls. “They have tons of little things like jewelry boxes and small decor items,” he says. “When you look at them as shapes or objects rather than just for what they were intended, you can use that stuff to make this mini furniture.” 

One of the console tables is made from an upside-down candle holder with a cutting board attached to the top. He used a child’s desktop organizer to create another end table, which he painted and attached wood legs to the bottom of. “The better I get at scaling everything down, the more intense that optical illusion gets,” Benjamin says.

The Mini Living Room is always changing, which is part of what makes it such a fun project for Benjamin, the dogs, and his followers. “There’s so much stuff too that’s subtle. You can go back to old videos and see stuff you might have missed the first time,” he says. And since so much is made from other things, he insists it’s not an overly expensive project to keep up with. “This stuff is all $20 each, it’s not like I’m spending thousands and thousands of dollars,” he says.

When Kelsey and Ryan, the couple behind the brand Newbuild Newlyweds, were house hunting, it was extremely important to them that they got a house that had extra space for a room for their cat, Stella. In their old home, they’d turned a spare storage space under their stairs into a farmhouse-style abode for the feline. “When we moved and we were searching for this house, that was my number one thing,” Kelsey recalls. “I was like we need somewhere we can make another cat bedroom.”

Stella’s new home base is full of pink and gold accents, with line-drawn cat wallpaper and a gallery wall featuring pictures of her family. She’s got a baby pink sofa directly in front of her TV (which is an Amazon Fire tablet), and she even has an en-suite bathroom.

The room started as two cedar closets with a bunch of dead space in the middle. Kelsey and Ryan took all of it down to studs and then combined the middle area that eventually became the main bedroom. “Then, we framed out the other closet to be just a smaller side, and we framed out a little hole in the bottom so she could walk in,” Kelsey says. The other closet is where her litter box is, and the whole space has motion sensor lights so she can always see.

“It’s a way to keep all of her stuff out of sight, but still be a cool area,” Kelsey says. At times, people will ask the couple why they would go through the trouble of creating something like this “just for a cat,” to which the answer seems overwhelmingly obvious: Because it’s fun.

“We’ve been renovating our house for seven months at this point,” Kelsey says. She also admits there were things to do that might have been more important than building a cat bedroom. “But after what feels like an endless renovation, you sometimes just need those fun projects that make you feel good and make you happy.”

Similarly, Peggy White started making a bedroom for her cats as a form of therapy. “A lot of it was for a grieving process,” she says. The project started when her vet informed her that her young cat, Herman, had kidney failure and would soon pass away. “I was literally just painting and crying in the closet, but that’s what I needed,” Peggy adds.

Creating the space was both a way to memorialize Herman, give him a nesting spot for the last bit of his life, and provide a quiet place for her other cats, Frankie and Gulliver, to eat and relax. The whole thing came together somewhat organically and started with a simple mural on one wall and a hanging macrame bed. “Then, I just started adding things,” Peggy says. Today, the room has plenty of catwalks and shelves for the animals to jump on, a mini disco ball, a dance pole, and even a little memorial for Herman. When she shared the room on TikTok, the video quickly went viral. “People were commenting about how the cats live better than them,” she says.

Whether pet rooms are more for the pets or the people who own them is still to be determined, but using creativity and a little elbow grease to honor the animals we love should never feel like a waste of energy. “It’s a really fun thing to do,” Benjamin concludes. “The dogs love the room, it actually serves a purpose, and it’s just adorable.”