Coffee Table Review: House Cat: Inspirational Interiors & The Elegant Felines Who Call Them Home

Posted on February 15, 2024 at 7:02 am by Gene Ambaum

House Cat: Inspirational Interiors & The Elegant Felines Who Call Them Home by Paul Barbera with Rafael Waack. Thames & Hudson, 2024. 9781760764036. 240pp.

This is a follow-up to Barbera’s Where They Purr features US cats (and interiors). In his introduction he calls out Lady Penelope as one of his favorite subjects — there’s a reproduction of Sputnik in the living room of her place, a penthouse in New York City’s financial district that also includes an adult-sized slide, a lamp that looks like a small horse, and the coolest place for a cat to take a nap I’ve ever seen. My favorite space is the one in Chelsea, New York, that’s filled with more books and cats (three) than my wife would ever allow. The shelves are amazing, but so are the stacks of books that seem to function as furniture. Amen.

Includes a visual table of contents featuring cats, plus a number of photos of each interior/cat habitat, words describing the space and its occupants (ranging from one to nine in number), and a Q&A about the cat(s) in that chapter.