House cats are the descendants of tree-dwellers and have an instinctive desire (and aptitude) for climbing.
In 1968, a Los Angeles man named Frank Crow patented the “cat tree.”
If you’ve never seen one, imagine a cluster of elevated buildings from The Jetsons, except constructed out of beige carpeting instead of glass and home to a house cat instead of a family with a robot maid.
The internet has little to say about the Frank Crow who invented the cat tree, but lots about another Frank Crowe, the head engineer of the Hoover Dam. Despite the slight spelling variation, I like to imagine that these are one and the same person, and that the builder of the mighty Hoover devoted his retirement years to feats of feline architecture.
In the patent application, Crow writes that his invention “provides an answer to problems most commonly faced by cat owners who esteem their pets to the point of housing them within their own dwellings.” Imagine! Such esteem! But in spite of the hokey verbiage, the passage makes a valid point: Cat trees aren’t just another flourish from the mod decade. Unlike most 1960s design — highlights include the beanbag chair, the hand-shaped chair and the lava lamp — cat trees attempt to solve an actual problem.
Mike and Corrine Carson use reclaimed elm branches as the base for their cat trees.
Before becoming a cat owner earlier this year, I was dimly aware that cats had a tendency to climb things. I assumed this happened relatively infrequently and ended in rescue and friendly scolding by firefighters (I blame Norman Rockwell for my ignorance). In reality, of course, house cats are the descendants of tree-dwellers and have an instinctive desire (and aptitude) for climbing. Don’t forget: The beast deigning to let you rub its belly is a cousin to cougars.
After fabricating nearly 8,000 cat trees over the past 15 years, Mike and Corrine Carson of Paw Friendly Cat Furniture of Cross Plains are as close to cat tree guru status as (humanly) possible. Their journey started in 2004, when they became a foster family for cats from the rescue Angel’s Wish in Verona.
“You just wake up one day and realize you have seven cats,” says Mike, laughing.
Unsatisfied with the cat trees on the market and alarmed at the deterioration of their furniture, the Carsons, like any resourceful Wisconsinites, decided to take matters into their own hands. After making a cat tree for their home, they decided to make a few more to sell at Angel’s Wish. Before long they were selling their works at MadCat and other regional pet stores, and traveling to cat shows on weekends.
At the suggestion of a contact at MadCat, Mike and Corrine transitioned from traditional, boxy carpeted forms (cats quickly claw through the vertical carpeted sections) to structures built from reclaimed elm branches.
Elm is a hard enough wood to stand up to cat claws, and the bark splits off by itself. The
Carsons used to scavenge their own logs, but these days they collaborate with a local firewood supplier. Their garage workshop is a small forest of elm branches.
From the beginning, Mark and Corrine have worked in tandem, collaborating on the design, construction, and business management. A pair of his-and-hers industrial-size hot glue guns on their battered workbench stand as a testament to their side-by-side method. After building thousands of cat trees, the couple has thoroughly refined their fabrication method, but the subtle variations of each branch make every cat tree an exercise in sculptural assemblage.
Some of their customers own nine or 10 of their cat trees. Mike and Corrine own at least this many for their own cats, Butterball, Gizmo and Princess.
They’re happy to customize, although they ask the customer to provide carpet if they want something other than beige. For three-legged cats, they build trees with tighter spacing between the platforms, and for a MadCat shop cat with a degenerative eye condition, they once built an 11-foot-tall cat tree with extra sticks to alert the cat when she neared the edges. Butterball, the Carson’s stout rescue, has a tree with an extra-sturdy platform.
Mike and Corrine still love the artistic challenges of the work and hope to one day expand to a larger workspace and hire an employee or two. But the cat trees themselves, which use mostly natural, locally sourced materials, won’t change too much.
“We’ve got it pretty dialed in,” Mike says.
There’s something incredibly natural about seeing a cat resting on top of a sturdy tree branch. Just last week, after Googling “Why do cats purr?” (I’m still a bit clueless and dewy-eyed about the species) I stumbled across a Scientific American article about studies that demonstrate that, rather than simply being a sign of happiness, purring occurs at a frequency that stimulates cats’ bone and muscle growth. Among other things, the finding might explain cats’ strange ability to toggle between utter inactivity and extreme athleticism.
The next time you see a cat purring from high atop a perch, remember that she isn’t just being conspicuously content — she’s feeling a little bit wild, too.
Paw Friendly Cat Furniture
Trees are sold through Angel’s Wish, at MadCat and Tabby & Jack’s-Middleton, through the website and at various cat shows.
$125-$230 with bed add-ons and other customization extra.
