Dog House Designs and Barkitecture: 3 Fun Pet Design Projects for Kids!

Dog house designs and Barkitecture are trending. For this blog, we have pulled together some of our most popular design projects featuring pets. Seriously, design lovers and dog-obsessed peeps you and your students are in for a treat. In this we will:

1. share a simple process for drawing a dog house design in isometric for your youngest students,

2. provide a fun cat climbing tower design challenge, and

3. showcase a primary student’s deluxe dog house design that has built-in entertainment features and a chandelier! It would totally make other doggie parents and definitely Rumer Willis’s dog jealous.

First, let us break down the concept of barkitecture and how we can use it in our classrooms to inspire good design.

Text reads. Barkitecture. 3 Fun Pet Designs for Kids. showing a hand drawn image of a deluxe pet treehouse
Grade 2 and 4 students work sample of barkitecture design.

What is barkitecture?

You could be forgiven for thinking “What is barkitecture?”. It’s a relatively new term that has in recent years been gaining popularity with dog lovers. Barkitecture is a combination of the words bark (as in a dog’s bark) and architecture. It is the process of designing and building animal structures. Architecture for pets or even wild animals. Your students may have even seen the new show on TV named Barkitecture. Hosted by general contractor Tyler Cameron and interior designer Delia Kenza the show follows them through the building process of some insane dog houses. You might even want to show your students some images of the luxury dog homes featured in the show. I’ll leave a link in the resource section below for our Pinterest Board full of inspiring images for Barkitecture.

 

“Every dog caravan needs a chandelier” Ava aged 9 

These FUN and CLEVER barkitecture design for kids examples will have you dreaming up designs for your own ultimate canine bungalow or a kitty condo. Keep in mind it doesn’t all have to be luxury off the leash and it’s definitely not just for the glamorous doggie. It’s about making our fury babies and fur friends feel safe and potentially entertained at the same time. After all, pets, and in particular cats and dogs have long been regarded as a human’s best friends. There have been instances in the past where cultures worshipped these animals such as in Ancient Egypt and India. So it is no surprise that humans like to make sure their pets have all the creature comforts they need to lead a happy and fun life! Plus, if you are anything like me you’ll be whipping up an integrated unit in no time.

To get started use our barkitecture design examples for kids below to create an awesome home for your pets! Make sure you match your pet’s home to its personality and have fun with it! 

 

1. Dog House Designs Easy Tutorial

Dog house design for a new puppy can be a great engineering design challenge for students in the classroom or at home. Many of our teachers have also used the following tutorial in their maths lessons for exploring 3D (isometric) shapes. In this video, we show you how to design your own Puppy House! Watch as Charles draws and Glenny D narrates how to make a basic puppy shelter in a few simple steps.

Firstly you draw the bottom parts of a 3D cube using the Splat 3D tool. Then you “Spin the splat” upside down to finish the top part of the cube.

Drawing showing a cube in isometric being drawn using a blue Splat 3d drawing tool
Simple dog house design starts with a cube.
Adding a roof to the drawing of a simple dog house.
Adding a traditional roof to the base of the dog house design.
Completed coloured hand drawn dog house design idea by grade 2 student.
Grade 2 student’s finished design.

Charles then draws the opening to the puppy shelter with the ellipse section of the splat. Following this, he draws the roof of the dog house design using a series of lines between points. This creates the basis of a simple dog house or barkitecture structure. After you are done with the structure you can add anything you want!

Dog House Designs Inspiration

Once you have a go with our dog house design challenge you can create your own from your imagination! Here are some design considerations to kick off your ideating. What kind of puppy are you making the home for? How big will it grow? Do you want the puppy’s new home to have multiple rooms? Juliet balconies? Or matching house details like the furry friends of celebrity clientele, featured in the Barcitecture TV show. Perhaps you are designing for more than one dog, maybe a pup squad? Here is a link to the Pinterest board we created for some barkitecture inspiration.

If you are in doubt your students in first grade can draw in isometric without dot paper, then check out these awesome work samples from young primary-aged/elementary students. We also created an activity sheet for our youngest students – no Splats required. Feel free to download this freebie and try it out with your Kindergarten to Grade 2 classes – link below tutorial.

Eight individual hand drawings of simple dog houses by junior primary students.

Simple Dog House Design Drawing in 3D

Designing Cat Walkways and Towers

Drawing in 3D of Cat Tower Designs by Charles and Ava.

Most kids love cats! To keep our cat’s happy many fur parents invest in climbing towers. These cat towers can offer your cat a safe place to scratch, climb and stretch when stuck inside. We even discovered in our research phase that conflict can also be reduced between indoor cats if they have access to a climbing tower. If your students don’t have a cat, start by imagining one, or choose a cat from one of their favourite picture books to design a tower for. Prompting your students with questions will help facilitate their creativity.

Is it a sleepy cat, grumpy, or playful?

Would it want a hideaway to sleep in or a platform to spy on the neighbour’s dog?

Student entries – a pet’s dream.

Below are some of the entries, including the winner of our school competition which ran during the Covid lockdown in 2021. Mrs. J Seawell a fabulous technology teacher from Sydney sent in some amazing entries by her students. The green image below took out the main prize and was hand-drawn by a Grade 4 student using the Splat 3D drawing tool. AMAZING!

students hand drawn cat tower work example beautifully coloured in.
Cat Tower. Grade 4 work sample.
Cat Climbing Tower hand drawn design by grade 4 student. Stunning colour and form to create this winning design
Luxury cat climbing tree design entry by grade 4 student.

Cat Tower Design Challenge Video

Why not try this challenge with your students. Watch the video below to see Glenny D take you through the steps of how you can create your own Climbing Cat Tower. During the tutorial, Glenny D will also show you how to draw a simple cat! 

First Glenny D draws three cubes stacked vertically to create a basic tower for our feline friend. Next, he hollows out the top cube by drawing some extra Iines and using his eraser to rub out some of the initial lines he drew. 

 Join in the fun as Glenny D and the kids face off over a Cat Climbing Tower design challenge. We love seeing the kids think out challenges in real-time and put their spatial skills into practice for this challenge. We’re always blown away by how creative they are at approaching the challenges. Thus, we had to call in our dog Obi to judge the final winner. Do your students agree with Obi?

Special guest judge – Obi announces the winners. Ava and Charles.

Luxury Canine Caravan

Using our Splat 3D drawing tool, Ava and Glenny D show you how to take your dog house design ideas to the next level. Watch this tutorial to create a super fancy dog caravan in an isometric view. Plans in isometric view are an important part of the building process. Ava starts off her dog house design with 3 cubes in a row to make the foundation of the caravan. Stacking and repeating cubes in a row is a technique called ‘crating’. Think of milk crates. You can see in this tutorial how easy a drawing task becomes once these guidelines are in place.

outline of 3 cubes creating a rectangle prism.
Step one. Creating guidelines.

Once you have the guidelines for your caravan drawn you can add any special features to suit your dog’s needs. A simple rectangle in isometric view could be a window or swapped out for a TV screen!

pencil outline of caravan before any details and features are added.
Ava’s design concept before design features have been added.

Ava LOVED this fun idea and particularly enjoyed drawing in a rug, chandelier, and speakers for music! Her goal was to ensure Obi had enough room to stretch. She also used some pictures she cut from an old magazine to give more detail to her design concept. Ava says, ‘Our dog Obi is going to enjoy travelling in the lap of luxury on his road trips and holidays if we ever have time to build this.” Have a look at the video below to check out Ava’s finished design.

If you enjoyed these examples, check out our other videos on our YouTube channel and stay tuned for more great design challenges for kids. If you would like even more support you can also join Design School for Teachers Group via our Facebook page.

Design Debrief.

To sum up, Barkitecture and dog house design looks like A LOT of FUN, it is a very serious business. Design ideas that marry practicality and function are always highly successful. The industry itself is was worth 2.5 Billion US Dollars in 2020. It is considered a trending market with more products every year including sensors and apps for additional internet of things functionality.

Barkitecture can help integrate the pet’s life and the owner’s life to make sure they both have their own spaces and needs met. This is perfect if you are teaching additional needs students design or younger students, as they often find it easier to empathize with pets/animals than humans. One of the best ‘design thinking’ conversations I’ve had whilst teaching occurred when the Year 1 students challenged the idea that blind cats can’t climb. We discovered blind cats can climb and fixed climbing towers offer them an excellent exercise option as they are less likely to be free to roam outside.

Getting your kids engaged in a design challenge is easy if they are invested, and who are they more loyal to than their pets? This helps them consider the problem from a vantage point they are already familiar with yet stretches them to apply what they think they know in a new context. What kind of dog breed is going to be living in your pet home? What type of structure would interest your pet? Will the pet home be transportable? There are so many great ideas that can come out of creative design thinking in this way. Check out the links below for more info and resources on Barkitecture and dog house designs for kids. 

Please note: Turn Card Content and Bravo Media produced the Barkitecture series in 2020 which will air exclusively on short-form video platform Quibi. Here is a link to the article referenced in this blog.