Our Story

The idea for the CathouseMaze came to me in a dream one night.

We had just sold our home on a small island in the Florida Keys where our two cats, Onyx and Topaz, had the run of the property. Because they were getting older and little less adventuresome, we decided to keep them in our new home enclosed in a screened-in pool area that was large enough for them to wander, but would protect them from other animals in the neighborhood (and vice versa...while Topaz is the brains of the two, Onyx is the "protector" of the yard and quite territorial).

Our new home had a screened-in porch, but was susceptible to the weather and it rains here frequently. I had purchased one of those small igloo pet houses just to give them some protection from the weather. Unfortunately, the rain sometimes flooded the concrete porch and the little house was floating round with the cats looking wide-eyed and down right irritated with their circumstances.

I started looking for a better solution, but didn't really find one in the pet marketplace that fit all of our needs. It was about that time that I had a dream that solved the problem. In my dream, the maze was much larger and more intricate. I saw a footprint of 12" x 48" and 8' high. Structurally, this is very possible to build and works well if you have a large enough space to accommodate it. (I'm sure the size of it had more to do with our cats trying to influence my dreams than the reality of our space limitations).

Like all good market researchers, I built a prototype out of cardboard and tested it with the cats. Initially, I thought they might like to have some windows in the maze to look out, but they spent all of their time hiding in the areas without windows. Cats, of course, love to crawl into dark spaces, curl up and sleep, content in the knowledge that they are safe from observation and won't have their sleep interrupted.

Anyway, I started doing some drawings and talking with my friend, Bill Palmer, who is an extraordinary woodworker in building functional furniture out of exotic woods. ( Incidentally, he and his wife Ellen have just moved to Ashville , NC and are spending six months a year at her family home on the island of Cyprus . Bill has requested that he now be identified as the internationally renowned furniture and pet accessory designer, and changed his name to Angelucci dePalmera. Besides being a great woodworker, he also has a great sense of humor ) .

At any rate, Bill recommended signboard so that it would hold up to the weather, be easy to work with, and yet light enough to move around on wheels if the need arose. And it works perfectly.

The CathouseMaze is a home within a home for our cats. It can be for your cats too.