Keith Miller is an award-winning interior designer who creates beautiful spaces that showcase each client’s passions and help them flourish. In this video, he discusses how he crafted a beautiful space for a woman who wanted her cats to enjoy climbing to their hearts’ content inside her home.
A Home For Forgotten Felines
Hello, I’m Keith Miller, Miller Interior Design. We just wrapped up a really sweet project. This one’s more about living large in a small space. This remarkable woman spent 2020, when the entire island of Manhattan was in crisis like the rest of us — no one is on the streets, the entire entertainment industry is leaving, a lot of people panicked and left their animals behind — and this woman gathered a troupe of friends and scoured the entire island for every wandering feline. She collected all of them, hundreds. She managed to house every cat they found except for the last six special needs cats. So, I get this call. I’m learning about her love for these cats and how we might make a house that’s suitable for them, unsure what I would be encountering when I came to visit. 
I met her at the front porch and she’s immediately so warm and welcoming. I walk into her home, and I have to tell you, I’ve been around people who like a lot of cats, and it’s not typically a pristine experience. That was absolutely not the case here. I walked into her home, and it was spotless and everything was in place. I couldn’t tell a cat even lived there other than the accoutrements. “Wow, this is a beautiful place,” I said. “It’s really pleasant, just the way it is. What do you need me here for?” 
And she said, “I like what I’ve done here, but it just isn’t comfortable for how I really want to experience this place with these cats. I think there’s more that could be done and I want to make this place really special. I just sensed from when we had our conversations together that, Keith, you’d be up for that.” And I am 100% up for making special experiences for people.
Designing a Climbable Cottage Interior
We start with what it is she needs most for these cats. Cats need lots of secret spaces. They need levels and tiers of seating areas and places where they hide, places to climb around and run. 
And in this tiny cottage, we were able to put together some pretty clever ways to get cats up and around. I think one of the favorite parts of the project was trying to figure out who it is that I’m going to have make this climbing tree, who’s going to do that kind of work? “Now, what do you want?” “I would like you to make a tree that cats can climb in, in the house.” Hey, that’s a real deal. We’re actually doing this. And trying to do that tastefully is really important to me. And I hope, through me, then it’s important to the person I’m serving. I didn’t have a single person I knew who would be willing to do this woodwork.
Finding the Right Carpenter
The kind of serendipity that my company runs across is something that goes beyond coincidence. It’s surprising how I will be able to find the right ingredients, the right people, the right products, and the right elements for the very peculiar solutions that we need to come across. I went to San Juan Island for another project. I needed to get something to eat, so I saw this interesting restaurant and had this hunch. It’s out away from downtown. It has a quirky name. I bet you this is the place where those who live on the island have a good meal. So, I wandered out to that restaurant and, sure enough, it is a stunning, five-star, incredible interior. I walked in and the hostess for the evening was a good friend of mine I didn’t even know was on the island. She was visiting a friend. Her friend needed a little help in the restaurant. The proprietor herself came and sat down with us. What do I do? Explain. “Oh, my husband’s a carpenter,” she says. “Is he now? What kind of carpentry?” “Well, he usually just focuses on this island alone.” I was able to meet him anyway and convince him to build a cat tree.
A Serendipitous Source of Sustainable Wood
Our client is adamant the cat tree must be Madrona. I agree. Madrona is a very specific tree to Whidbey Island and the region here in the Pacific Northwest. It has an interesting peculiar bark formation and a beautiful, deep mahogany, purple-red tonation to branches underneath it. It’s an interesting tree, hard to work with, but very beautiful. It’s very important to our client that this tree isn’t something that you find and saw off. These aren’t farmed trees. They’re just growing in the wild around the islands. 
So, it’d be great if we could guarantee that it was a tree that had fallen. How are you going to know? It’s hard to know that for real unless you actually hear the tree falling in the forest. Yes, that actually happened. So, Arvid is out fishing some week in a few weeks after we encourage him to do this project. We’re all saying, “Let’s just wait and see what we can find, anybody we might know who has a Madrona that has fallen.” And he’s fishing out in the Hood Canal and he hears a tree fall. He looks over, and it’s a Madrona. He gets out of his boat, walks up to the property, knocks on the door, and asks the people who own it, “Hey, I just found one of your trees falling. Can I extract that for you?” “That’d be great. Feel free.” How does that happen?
Bringing the Cat Tree to Life
We have this tree form, we strip it of its bark. We put ultraviolet light on this beautiful tree to make sure that we can get it down to the purple colors that we need it to be. We form it according to the drawing we had. 
It’s a beautiful concept come to life. Live edge tree forms, carpeted insets for the cats to tuck in on and make the jungle gym, cat forests, climbing, exercise, resting, walkabout tree form for cats in a cabin. 
I’ve heard this many times from clients after we furnished an interior. Their friends will come by and they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, this place is so you.” When I hear that, I know I’ve done my job, rather than who did your house. I don’t need to be known. I want to be in the background making this thing happen. 
So, when people come and see that I’ve defined a specific unique personality, lifting that personality to the best and finest of who they are, yes, that’s what we’re talking about. So, to spend the time learning how to build a cat environment, I love knowing how I’m putting this together is going to be making this person feel delighted to come into their house every day and watch their cats thrive. That’s what we do. 
Do You Have a Unique Interior Design Project in Mind?
Miller Interior Design aims to create interiors that uplift and inspire each client based on your personality. If you have a project you’d like to collaborate on with us, you can reach out to us:
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