A dog daycare, training, boarding, and grooming facility in Manhattan’s West Village.

2023-2024

3100 sf Interior Renovation

The space occupies the ground floor and basement of a new construction building, a concrete box with a full storefront on Christopher Street. Marketed more towards retail tenants, the designers and Dogtown partners immediately saw the potential in having a space more open to the street. In New York City, most, if not all, of the dog daycare spaces keep the dogs far away from the street, a pragmatic choice considering that dogs can be distracted and agitated by seeing people. However, the clients and architect were interested in taking a chance, and by doing so have created a new attraction (and effective advertising for the business) for pedestrians walking down Christopher Street towards Hudson River Park.

Drawing inspiration from the early skate (and dog) culture of the Dogtown area of Los Angeles, the dog spaces incorporate elements like ramps and half pipes from the world of skate parks and an overall palette meant to evoke Southern California from the 70s with bright yellow greens and plywood. Early Frank Gehry designs with their exposed stud framing and clashing forms also provided a touch point.

Designing a space for dogs was a completely new challenge for TUNA. For TUNA principal, Chris Gardner, “It was very hard finding relevant precedents, most information was targeted towards larger non-urban facilities, and with the few dog daycare space in the city, you couldn’t really see much past the fairly unadorned reception areas.” Working closely with Colin Hunter, (a trained dog behaviorist and Dogtown business partner) TUNA was able to develop a design deeply informed by dogs’ needs and behavior. Citing an interesting example of this:

“As humans we are more or less indifferent to door swing direction outside of code considerations, but after some tests with dogs, we noticed there was a difference in how they responded to in-swing, out-swing, and sliding partitions, moving forward, backward, and staying stationary respectively. We used this information to plan the door and gate opening sequences from the front door to the dog space.”

While the overall palette looked for a casual feel, the specific material choices were driven by intense and varied performance requirements. The floor throughout is covered in Nora rubber flooring, the same product used on NYC subways. Highly resilient and easy to clean, the floor also provides traction and cushioning for dogs’ bare paws. Here the material wraps up the walls of the dog spaces for easy cleaning and employs a radius at inside corners to prevent digging.

The entire ceiling and most of the walls are covered in wood fiber acoustic panels. Utilizing recycled wood substrate and bound with cementitious binder, the material maintains a natural look, and together with the rubber flooring, prevents acoustic transmission to the residential units above, while also dampening reverberation from dog barks, creating a more acoustically comfortable environment for Dogtown employees.

The sprinkler standpipe for the entire building runs through the space, and by code could not be hidden or painted anything other than bright red. To accommodate this into the overall palette, all the hardware in the space utilizes the same fire engine red. This approach followed through the rest of the design, where much of the space is occupied by building systems infrastructure, rather than closing it off, it is left in view behind cable mesh screens to maintain spatial openness and embrace the reality of the site.

Beyond the architectural design, the building systems also required deeper consideration than usual. The design load for the heating and cooling system had to be determined by calculating the number of dogs in the space and their relative activity level (we had to source standards from academic articles rather than ASHRAE). Similarly the ventilation system processes 24 air exchanges per hour, 3 times more than a retail or restaurant space.

The lighting also had some specific demands. Dogs perceive and react to shadows on the ground, so the lighting in the space needed to be evenly spaced and with a wide beam distribution to avoid creating any hard shadows. The lights also feature a dim-to-warm function which through a timer slowly dims the space and warms the light temperature from 3000k down to 1800k. The goal here is to reinforce the circadian rhythm in the dogs and for the overnight boarders, to put them in a more relaxed mental state.

Some other notable details:

The reception desk incorporates a sliding gate, utilizing a custom handle and latch which evokes a dog with a bone in it’s mouth.

The hooks used to hang dog leashes are flexible rubber and come from the world of horse stables, preventing animals and humans from injuring themselves.

There is a mural in the main area which features portraits of the owners dogs.

The grooming area is also visible from the street, with the grooming table centered on an interior window.

The HVAC system incorporates a fabric supply duct which can be demounted and washed in a washing machine but also provides more even distribution than a typical register.