Felt Cat Houses: What They Are, How They Are Made, and How to Pick One

It is one piece of wool. Not a cushion in a cover, not a frame with fabric stretched over it, and not stitched together from panels. Raw Himalayan sheep wool is laid out in crossed layers, wetted with warm soapy water and worked by hand until the scales on each fibre lock into their neighbours and the whole thing becomes a single dense sheet. Shaped over a form while it is still wet, that sheet dries into a cave.

The absence of seams is the point. There is no stitching to come apart at the entrance, where all the wear happens, and nothing glued that can let go. When a felted cave finally wears out, years in, it wears thin rather than falling apart.

The density is what lets it stand. A good one keeps its opening round when you press the side and springs back when you let go. A thin or under-felted one folds at the doorway on the first week and never recovers, which is the single most useful thing to check when you are comparing two of them.

A cat is trying to be warmer than your room, and it spends twelve to sixteen hours a day at it. Wool traps air in the crimp of the fibre, so the cave holds the cat’s own heat around it. A plastic igloo has none of that: it blocks draught and nothing else, so the cat warms the air inside once and then loses it through the shell.

Wool also handles damp. It can take up a good deal of moisture before it feels wet, which matters for a bed an animal breathes into all night. Fleece does the opposite and holds it on the surface.

And there is the claw problem. Woven and knitted fabrics have loops, and a loop is something to hook, pull and ruin. Felt is matted rather than woven, so there is nothing to snag and nothing to unravel when a cat kneads it, which cats do to anything that gives slightly under the paw.

Cats sleep curled, and a curled cat takes up far less room than a stretched one. The rule that works is that the cave should be about one and a half times the length of the cat measured nose to base of tail, and no more. A cave much bigger than that never warms up properly, which defeats the purpose.

Most adult domestic cats, four to six kilos, are comfortable in a cave with an internal width around thirty five to forty centimetres and an entrance around eighteen to twenty. An entrance smaller than that is a squeeze for an adult cat; much larger and it stops feeling like a cave and starts feeling like a bowl.

For a large cat, a Maine Coon or a Ragdoll, measure before buying rather than guessing. For a kitten, buy for the adult it will become, and put something of yours inside in the meantime so the extra space is not intimidating.

If two cats share, buy two. Cats that groom each other still mostly sleep alone, and a single cave usually becomes one cat’s property rather than a shared one.

The dye is applied to the wool before felting rather than printed on the surface, so the colour runs all the way through. This matters more than it sounds: a surface print on a bed is sitting directly against the animal that lies on it, and it wears off exactly where the cat lies.

Shape is mostly about your house rather than the cat. A plain dome disappears into a room; a pumpkin or a cat-faced house is a piece of furniture people notice. The cat has no opinion, so long as it has walls and one entrance.

One practical note on colour: a pale cave shows every hair and every muddy paw, and you cannot wash felt often. If your cat is dark, a mid tone will look better for longer.

Wash it as little as you can. Shake it out, then vacuum it with an upholstery attachment. Wool sheds dirt better than almost anything else, and every wash softens the felt a little and brings the collapse at the doorway closer.

For an accident, spot clean with cool water and a mild soap, press the water out rather than wringing, reshape it by hand and dry it away from any direct heat. Hot water and a tumble dryer will shrink felt and harden it, and there is no undoing that.

Do not wash a new one before giving it to the cat. It needs to pick up the smell of the house and of the cat to be accepted, and a bed that smells of detergent has to be claimed from nothing.

They are made in Nepal, by hand, from Himalayan sheep wool, by people who felt for a living rather than as a sideline. Felting is old work in the hills, older than weaving, and the craft survives there for the reason most crafts survive anywhere: the thing it makes is genuinely better than the factory version.

We buy them made, we do not commission a design and have it copied. What you get is what the maker makes, which is why the shapes on our shelf change from one shipment to the next.

They ship from our Vancouver store to every province and territory in Canada.