5 Doghouses that May Be Nicer Than Your House
No, we are not barking up the wrong tree with this story (and, yes, that's just the first of a whole bunch of really bad wordplay you'll find in the next handful of pages). Frankly, we think doghouses are right at home in This Old House. From our point of view, the five canine cribs that follow make perfect sense given the love affair that most Americans-and certainly our readers-have with their pets. But we also think these doggie domiciles are a pretty good way of putting the fine-craftsmanship cornerstone of TOH on display. -Jason Carpenter & Thomas Baker,This Old Housemagazine
This scaled-down brick Georgian is a masterpiece of fool-the-eye invention, starting with the bricks. The faux masonry is actually individual pieces of 1/4-inch Lauan plywood, covered with a textured terra-cotta paint. See more on this doghouse here.
If a cobbler's children have no shoes, then you might expect a doghouse builder's dog to have nothing more than a corner of the workshop floor to call his own. Luckily for Gumpy, that wasn't true.
Carpenter Mark Jolliffe, who with his brother, Dale, designed and built the canine constructions featured here, made his 8-year-old Shetland sheepdog companion a storybook Arts and Crafts bungalow. See more details from this doghouse here.
A farmhouse without a dog is like a ...well, we don't even want to contemplate it. And neither does Emma. When the frisky yellow Labrador gets tired of barking at cows, digging holes in the garden, and chasing skunks on the range, she kicks back in a clapboard version of an American icon. Surely, original homesteaders couldn't find a better place to pass a summer afternoon than under the shade of its broad porch, which sweeps around the house like a cool country breeze. See more on how this doghouse was built here.
You don't have to be an English bulldog to feel right at home in an English-style Tudor. You don't have to be a bulldog at all, for that matter. Alfie, an 8-year-old boxer, liked this little cottage just fine. With its steeply pitched faux-slate roof and pale stucco exterior, the 4-foot-tall doghouse is Tudor to a tee. It's even got classic diamond-pane leaded-glass windows-except these are made of plastic gutter guard, cut to length and hand-painted an earthy red. See more about this doghouse here.
When you're a 90-pound Newfoundland, a simple studio apartment won't do. You need something suitably majestic. Something big and substantial, something with character. What you need is a front-lawn Queen Anne. With its intersecting rooflines, multiple gabled dormers, wraparound porches, and soaring turrets, a Queen Anne is the most over-the-top of Victorian-era styles. Keep reading about this doghouse here.
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