Cat furniture for a small apartment: buying up instead of out

Choosing cat furniture for a small apartment is a resource allocation problem with one scarce input. It is not floor area in general. It is clear floor area that you are willing to give up permanently, and in a studio or a one bedroom that number is often close to zero.

The good news is that the published guidance on what cats need indoors is mostly about numbers and separation rather than volume. Read it that way and a small flat is a solvable problem rather than a compromise. This article works through what the guidance asks for, how much of it costs nothing, and where the remaining gaps are worth money.

Cat furniture for a small apartment: what you actually have to provide

The AAFP and ISFM Feline Environmental Needs Guidelines, which are free to read in full, set out the targets in countable terms rather than square footage.

• "A cat should have a choice for each resource," with "a minimum of two resting areas, two feeding areas."
• Safe places, "sized to hold a single cat," should number "at least as many" as there are cats in the household.
• A safe place is "a private and secure area, often in a raised location," and "should have more than one entry."
• "Access to an elevated area increases the cat's vertical space and allows it to monitor its environment."
• Perches "should be wide enough and long enough to allow the cat to fully stretch," and "a hammock-style dip in the middle of the perch or shelf will aid the cat's sense of feeling hidden."

Read that list with a tape measure in mind. It asks for two resting places, in separate locations, at least one raised and secure, each large enough for a stretched-out cat. The total floor area required by that specification is zero, because every item on it can be satisfied above the floor.

Herron and Buffington's enrichment review in Compendium, 2010, hosted by the Ohio State Indoor Pet Initiative, adds the separation figure that matters most in a small space: arrange resources "to permit each cat to keep a social distance of 1 to 3 meters." In a small flat, three metres of separation between two resting places is usually achievable horizontally only once. Vertically, it is achievable several times.

Step one: audit before you buy anything

Walk the flat and write down every surface your cat already lies on. Not surfaces it could reach, surfaces it uses. Then write down every high surface it could reach if something were moved: the top of a wardrobe with a chair beside it, a bookcase shelf you could clear, a windowsill currently occupied by plants.

Most small flats have several of these, and most are unavailable only because of clutter or a missing step. Clearing a cupboard top and putting a folded blanket on it creates a resting place that satisfies the guidance and costs nothing. Do this first. It is free, it is reversible, and it tells you what gap is left.

Step two: build the route, not the destination

The commonest failure in a small flat is a high surface with no way up to it. A cat will take a staged route over a single big jump nearly every time, and in a small space the staging usually already exists in the form of normal furniture. Sofa arm to sofa back to bookshelf. Bed to chest of drawers to wardrobe top.

Work out your route on paper before you decide what to buy, because the route determines the height of whatever you add. A shelf at five feet is useless if the nearest step is at eighteen inches. A shelf at four feet with a chest of drawers under it is a two-move climb. The same logic means an added item often serves better as a step than as a destination: one small shelf placed to bridge a gap can unlock a cupboard top you already own.

Step three: spend wall, not floor

A wall-mounted shelf buys a resting place with a footprint of roughly its own depth, and no floor area at all.

Our perch is $69: a black board on two steel legs with a removable washable grey cushion, bolted to the wall. It is around two feet long and just under a foot deep. The two dimension figures we hold for the board disagree, 23.63 by 11.82 inches on the specification sheet against 24.4 inches wide on the drawing, so the product page prints both rather than quoting the larger one. Check that depth against your cat: it is enough for a cat to lie along, and it is not generous for a large cat that wants to curl sideways.

The cost of spending wall rather than floor is that you have to drill, and in a small rented flat that is the real decision. Two fixings leave two fillable holes, and whether that is acceptable is a question about your lease rather than about your cat. Our guide to mounting a cat shelf covers what different walls will take, and one thing worth knowing before you plan a layout: Table R602.3(5) of the residential code, reproduced in the Seattle Residential Code chapter on wall construction, permits 2 by 4 studs at 24 inches on centre in nonbearing walls and in bearing walls supporting only a roof and ceiling. So the framing may not be where you assume, and the position you want may not be a position you can fix into. Find the studs before you commit to a layout, not after.

Where a floor-standing tower still wins

Two reasons to give up floor area anyway, and we would rather say them than sell you the wrong thing.

Your cat scratches furniture. Wilson et al. (2016), the largest published owner survey on cat scratching behaviour with 4,105 qualifying respondents, found a preference for "a simple upright type or a cat tree with two or more levels and at least 3 ft high." There is a free full text. A padded shelf provides no scratching surface at all, so if the sofa is the problem, a shelf is not the fix. Our cat tree guide is the place to start.

Your cat wants to climb rather than to watch. Climbing is a behaviour a shelf cannot provide, as Herron and Buffington note when they write that "domestic cats naturally climb for observation and safety." Those are two separate motives and a shelf serves only the second.

If you do go floor-standing in a small space, there is a helpful finding in the same survey: narrower posts with a base width of three feet or under were used more often than wider posts with a base of five feet or more. Small-footprint designs were not the compromise option in that data. Ours is 48.8 inches tall at $119 and we sell it here. Our cat perch or cat tree comparison works through which constraint should decide.

A worked layout for one room and one cat

A plan that satisfies the guidance in a single room, using mostly things you own.

1. Resting place one, low and enclosed. A covered bed, a box, or the space under a chair, with more than one way out as the guidelines ask. Floor cost: a cushion's footprint.
2. Resting place two, raised, at a window. Where a shelf earns its money if your sills are narrow. Floor cost: none.
3. A step between existing furniture and resting place two. Usually already there.
4. A scratching surface, vertical, near where the cat spends time. Herron and Buffington recommend "prominent vertical objects in areas where they spend much of their time," and note that posts "should be placed in frequently visited areas of the home." Floor cost: small, and non-negotiable.
5. Food and water away from the litter tray, which is pillar two and is a layout decision rather than a purchase.

That is two resting places in separate locations, one of them raised, a route up, a scratching surface and separated resources. In a small flat it is achievable with one fixing job and one purchase, and sometimes with none.

One honest caveat about wall-mounted furniture

In that same Wilson survey, cats used wall-mounted posts least of the options offered, and among owners whose cats used a wall-mounted post, 74.1 percent reported unwanted scratching elsewhere in the home, against 55.3 percent for cats using a tree with one or more levels. The survey was about scratching posts rather than beds, and the wall-mounted group was only 81 cats, so it does not transfer cleanly to a padded shelf.

We still think you should know it, because the lesson is practical rather than discouraging: wall-mounted furniture cannot be moved after you drill, so it has to be right first time. In a small flat that is an argument for spending your effort on the audit and the route, and only then on the hardware. The long version is in our cat window perch guide.