Hi, I’m Ryan.

I rent a small apartment, I’ve read too many interior design blogs, and I have a cat. Those three facts are basically the whole origin story. Catmoderne started the day I finished getting my living room exactly right and then noticed the litter box in the corner, glowing beige, undoing the entire thing.

Here’s my actual pet peeve, if you want one: walk into any pet store and everything is either fire-engine red or the specific gray of a hospital waiting room. It’s like the whole industry decided cat owners don’t have eyes. I didn’t buy that. So I went looking for the side tables, benches, shelves, and enclosures that hide the “pet” part and let a room still feel like yours. Some of it is genuinely good. A lot of it just photographs well and falls apart in your living room. This site is me keeping track of which is which.

How I review

Every pick starts with two questions: would I actually put this in my own place, and does it survive real life — odor, cleaning access, footprint, assembly, and whether the cat deigns to use it? If a piece looks great but is a nightmare to clean, I say so. Hiding the annoying parts would make this site useless, and useless is boring.

Here’s the actual process behind a recommendation. I read through verified-purchase owner reviews looking for patterns — the complaint that shows up thirty times matters; the one-off doesn’t — and I cross-check the maker’s spec sheet against what owners photograph and report. Then I weigh the things that decide whether a piece works in a real apartment: dimensions and footprint, materials (solid wood vs. veneer vs. laminate), stability, cleaning access, and how much it looks like furniture instead of a pet product. Where a spec can’t be confirmed, I tell you rather than guessing.

To be plain about it: I have not handled any of these pieces in person. Every pick here is research-based, and every article says so in its byline — “Researched, not tested”, with the date the listings were last checked. If that ever changes, the article will carry a first-hand note naming the piece it applies to. Until then I’d rather be clear than pretend otherwise.

The same goes for the pictures. Every image on Catmoderne is an AI illustration, not a photograph. The product ones are made from photos of the real listing, so the shape and finish come out close, but close is not the same as right: check the actual piece on Amazon before you order. The room scenes are there to show a style, not a specific product.

A note on honesty

Catmoderne uses Amazon affiliate links: if you buy through one I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes which products I recommend or what I say about them. You can read the full affiliate disclosure anytime.

Anyway — thanks for reading. I hope it saves you from at least one ugly purchase.

— Ryan, Catmoderne