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Meow the 63rd – Homes, Castles, and Cats

My home is my castle, apparently. But the proverb is no longer true, apparently. It has to be rephrased as ‘My home is my cat’s castle’, apparently. Not just cats think that way, also companies have started to take this attitude, pardon, cattitude, as human flats are redesigned as cat flats.

CNN has taken up the recent trend in Asia to have ‘feline friendly’ appartments in their news section on architecture (Cat flats: designing human apartments for feline friends) and mentions Asian design studios, such as STDesign (Taiwan), OBBA (Korea), and LAAB (Hong Kong).

Ideal from a cat’s perspective, a cat flat has tiny arched doorways between rooms, shelves to hide in, cat highways to observe humans from above, cat ladders to make use of the third dimension, and more.

And a cat flat comes complete with servants, the humans who have taken the cat in. So, whose castle is it then? The answer is simple: the cat’s.


NB:The cat researcher’s perspective

From a cat content researcher’s perspective, two things are interesting: first, architects/designers have taken up designing for cats, and, second, the media thinks it is newsworthy. The unlikely mix of modern architecture and cats is probably the reason for the media coverage (cf. news value ‘unexpectedness’).

It seems as if cats are successfully occupying more and more modern human domains: contemporary architecture and media. This, however, is nothing new when we think about ancient Egypt with the Sphinx, the Bastet cult, cat mummies, and more.

There is one more thing, namely the association of the cat with the home. Again, this is nothing new, but this connection of cat and home is being played with in advertising, too (cf. ‘catvertising’).

Featured image: Ross, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Meow Factor (February 6, 2017). Meow the 63rd – Homes, Castles, and Cats. Meow Factor. Retrieved June 12, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rdqz


Meow Factor

a linguist researching language #purrieties and #meowlogism-s •alumna of SwanseaUni • loves cats • writes about cats • author of the book "Purrieties of Language. How We Talk about Cats Online

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