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A quirky new feline friendly café has opened in Leeds city centre, following a £500,000 refurbishment.

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Following the success of their original café in Nottingham, a new Leeds-based Kitty Café has opened its doors to cat lovers everywhere. Owner of the Kitty Café, Kate Charles-Richards, wanted the café to be vibrant and colourful, whilst still allowing the roaming cats to surprise guests as they hang from the ceiling or appear from under seats.

In order to make the concept a reality, interior design and architecture experts CPMG Architects were brought in to design the cat-friendly interior. The firm designed the full interior, which is made up of the café, a kitchen, office, lobby and reception desk, as well as completely rebranding the Kitty Café with a new logo and graphics.

With the cats at the forefront of the design needs, CPMG have designed the café to include a cat snug, bespoke runs for the cats to use and also created the UK’s largest cat scratching post. Cristina Riley, senior interior designer at CPMG said: “The Kitty Café was a really interesting project with a very specific brief. It was integral that the cats could easily run from the front to the back of the café”.

“There are bespoke shelves, bridges and posts to ensure that the cats can play and be as active as possible. The bespoke rope scratching post stands over two metres tall,” she continues, “the back of house area is designed specifically for cat naps and we even designed a private luxury cat snug, which the cats can access through holes in the wall.”

To make the cats feel as comfortable as possible in the space, CPMG have designed the cafe to be full of natural outdoor elements including faux greenery, birch posts and tree logs. There are also large windows that let in natural light, and display the cats to passers-by. This is an essential part of the design considering that the business’ main passion is cat rescue and adoption.

Kitty Café owners Kate and her husband Oliver find cats from local rescue centres and train them for four weeks, before welcoming them into the Kitty Café where they can enjoy the company of café customers. Budding cat owners that visit the café can then adopt one of the cats that live in the café (after a thorough vetting) and take them home.

“CPMG completed the brief beyond our expectations. Its team got fully on board with the concept of the Kitty Café and were very flexible with the changes we needed to make,” Kate said of the finished design, “They brought fantastic ideas to the table which made the new café even better than we had imagined. We’d love to work with the team again when we expand in 2018.”

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