We’ve got a dog called Maggie. She’s a kelpie cross, eight years old, and the patch of timber floor in front of our sofa has a slightly worn finish that maps almost exactly to where she does her morning stretch. That patch tells me everything I need to know about why “pet-friendly furniture” isn’t a marketing line. It’s a real design problem with real material and geometry implications.

About a third of our custom commissions in 2026 include a pet brief somewhere in the conversation. Five years ago it was maybe one in ten. Clients are increasingly clear that the furniture has to survive their dog, their cat, or both, without looking like prison-issue indestructible furniture.

Here’s how we’ve been approaching it, and what we’ve started doing with AI tools to model wear patterns before we cut any timber.

What dogs and cats actually do to furniture

Let me be precise about the failure modes we’re designing against.

Dogs scratch. Not at the furniture deliberately, mostly, but during the manoeuvre of getting up, lying down, and adjusting position. The scratch damage shows up on horizontal edges, the front face of sofas where they tuck into, and any vertical surface they brush against repeatedly. The damage is cumulative and gradual.

Dogs slobber. Particularly the breeds that drool a lot. Saliva is acidic enough to gradually break down most wood finishes, particularly water-based polyurethanes. Damage shows up on table edges and the front rail of sofas.

Dogs and cats both shed. Fur gets trapped in any cavity, particularly between cushions and frame, between fabric panels, and in any moulded detail. The fur itself isn’t damaging, but the dust that comes with it accelerates the wear on every finish it sits on.

Cats scratch deliberately. Vertical, with claws extended. Your three options are accept it, give them a better alternative, or design for it. Bouclé and tightly-looped fabrics are particularly attractive to cats because they hook claws nicely. Smooth tight weaves are less attractive.

Both species jump. Up and down off furniture, every day, multiple times. The wear pattern from a 25kg dog landing on the front edge of a sofa thousands of times is real, and the joinery has to handle it.

What we’re actually changing in designs

A few practical things we do differently on pet briefs.

Edges are more generously rounded. Sharp 90-degree exposed edges on horizontal surfaces last about two years with a moderately-sized dog in the house. A 6mm radius lasts considerably longer because there’s no sharp leading edge for claws to catch on.

Underframe clearances get reviewed. Cats in particular like to go under things, and getting too low a clearance means hair compacts under there and becomes impossible to clean. We aim for either flush-to-floor (with a vacuum-cleanable apron) or 100mm+ of clearance.

Fabric selection becomes the central question. Performance fabrics have come a long way. The current generation of polyester-based crypton-style fabrics survive dog claws better than most cottons or linens. Some of them feel more like fabric than they used to, though they still don’t feel as good as a good linen. The tradeoff is worth it for most pet households.

Joinery gets oversized. Mortise-and-tenon or dowel joints on a sofa frame designed for occasional use will fail prematurely with dogs jumping on the front edge. We size up. The frame gets heavier, more rigid, and we use timber species that don’t move much with humidity. Important in Sydney and Brisbane houses where summer humidity swings are significant.

Finishes shift toward hard-wax oils. Two-pack polyurethanes look spectacular when fresh. Hard-wax oils repair better. When a dog scratches a hard-wax finish, you can sand and re-oil the affected area without the patch showing. When a dog scratches a two-pack finish, you’re refinishing the whole surface to make the repair invisible.

Where AI tools are helping us model wear

This is where my last twelve months have been interesting. We’ve been working with Team400.ai on a tool that lets us visualise wear patterns on proposed designs before we build them. The basic premise is that we feed in the design, the species of pet, weight, age, and household traffic patterns, and the tool overlays where damage will accumulate over a 5-year and 10-year window.

It’s not magic. The model is essentially statistical: it draws on a dataset of furniture wear from pet households we and a few collaborating workshops have contributed to, and it projects forward based on the geometry of the design. But it’s surfaced a few things we’d been guessing at.

For example, we’d always intuitively reinforced the front rail of dining chairs because we knew dogs and kids both abused them. The model suggested we were under-reinforcing the back-left corner of dining chairs in households with two dogs, because the dog-handler’s chair tends to get nudged that way during meals. Small thing, but the kind of insight we’d never have surfaced from our own intuition.

The other useful AI piece is fabric wear simulation. Show the tool a fabric sample, give it the pet profile, and it’ll project visible wear after various use intervals. Not perfectly accurate, but accurate enough that we can have a more honest conversation with clients about which fabric will look how, when.

What we tell clients up front

Three things we’re now putting in writing on every pet-relevant brief.

First, no furniture is dog-proof. We can design something that survives a household with a kelpie for fifteen years and looks ninety percent of what it looked like new. We can’t design something that survives a great dane that jumps onto the dining table when no one’s home and emerges unchanged.

Second, you’re going to pay more for it. Pet-resilient furniture uses better hardware, better timber, better fabrics, more joinery, and tighter tolerances. The cost premium is real, somewhere between 15% and 30% on most projects. The lifespan offset usually justifies it. The upfront cost is sometimes a surprise.

Third, finishes age. Hard-wax oils develop a patina, particularly in high-touch areas. Some clients love this. Some clients want furniture to look identical at year ten as at year one. The latter is a much harder brief in a pet household and we’ll usually suggest a different finish approach or a more aggressive maintenance schedule.

Where this is going

The materials industry is moving fast. We’re seeing genuinely interesting new performance fabrics every six months, mostly from European manufacturers but increasingly from Australian and New Zealand mills working on wool-blend options that combine durability with the hand-feel of natural fibre. Sustainability and pet-resilience aren’t usually in conflict, but they’re not automatically aligned either. The fabrics that survive cats best are often petrochemical-based. The natural-fibre options I’d prefer to specify don’t always last.

The AI modelling tools will keep getting better. The dataset we’re building on now is small, and improvements are showing up monthly. Within two years I expect we’ll have models that can simulate not just wear patterns but the maintenance interventions needed at each stage, which is a much more useful conversation to have with clients than “buy this, hope for the best.”

If you’ve got pets and you’re commissioning custom furniture, the brief is more interesting than it used to be. The materials are better. The design intelligence is sharper. And the honest conversation about tradeoffs is easier to have when the data backs you up.

For more on the broader move toward biophilic and lifestyle-aware furniture design, the wider design community is paying attention. Pet-friendly is just one expression of that.

Maggie approves of our latest commission. Whether the client will in ten years is the question we’re still working on answering with confidence.