Forget the $800 Scandinavian pet den or the linen-covered cube your cat ignores in favor of your laptop bag. A really exciting piece of pet furniture to cross my feed this year is a 3D printed house shaped like a vintage CRT television, and the whole joke is that your pet becomes the show. He sits on the couch. He watches TV. The TV contains a cat. This is better than anything currently streaming. Designer uburnski uploaded the STL pack to Cults3D in January, and the community has been printing them in color combinations from dark grays and cyan accents to warm browns with greenish pinks ever since, each building sitting in someone’s living room as the world’s best conversation piece.
The file set uses 39 parts, is assembled with a dry joint system and super glue, and requires a print bed of at least 240 x 240 x 240mm for full scale output. The form is excellent: four pointed legs, two balled rabbit ear horns, three channel knobs with knobs, a honeycomb speaker grill, and a wide rectangular round screen opening where your cat, dog, or rabbit can walk and quickly sleep inside. The public made the show’s cats already curled up on the screen as if they could broadcast the most comfortable broadcast in the history of television, which, in fact, they are.
Designer: burnski
The design language that comes to burnski is the pure broadcast era of the 1960s, the kind of round, circular CRT that filled every American living room before flat screens made televisions invisible. That form carries a lot of nostalgic weight right now, seen on bags, neon signs, and enamel pins everywhere you look, but burnski is one of the few people who have taken it somewhere that really works. The rounded body, the stripped legs, the horns, none of this is an afterthought for decoration. They are the stuff of visual comedy that only works when all the details are nailed down. A CRT pet house with strong legs and no horns is just a box with a hole in it. This one reads like a TV across the room, which is the whole point.
Thirty-nine individual STL files cover everything from the outer casing panels, divided into eight sections labeled 1A through 2D for assembly, to the stud mounting blocks, knob faces, and front and rear vents. The connection system is built directly into the components, so the dry-assembly process takes care of itself before you even get to the glue. Burnski recommends two or three colors of filament, a minimum of two walls, and the installation of ten percent in most parts of the building, with supporting materials that are only required under the guarding section. The rear air intake panels and front grille inlays get a special tip from the construction notes: make them flat on your cutter, don’t be without upper and lower layers, and the exposed infill pattern becomes a design feature. Community builders have used gyroid and honeycomb fill patterns to great effect on these panels, which can be seen in the finished build images circulating on Cults3D.
Given the fact that you are 3D printing this, you can choose from a variety of colors. The gray and cyan version shown in Burnski’s own photos is clean and almost graphic, the kind of color that wouldn’t look out of place in a front-facing apartment. However, you’re not limited to that – go wild with pastels or neons, or just stick to one color prints if you’ve pressed the threads and paint designs/patterns on them later. After all, it is a house for pets, so remember to use safe and non-toxic paints.
You can play around with the measurements to make sure the shelter fits your pet. At 1:1 scale, the full-grown cat fits comfortably inside the screen and folds away, meaning the assembled unit is really big, closer to a bedside table than a desktop decoration. That scale is also what makes TV’s living room comedy come across in person rather than in pictures. A smaller version would be great if you have a small pet. A version big enough for a real animal to sit inside, sitting on all fours at ground level while you watch the couch, is another thing entirely.
The STL pack is available from Cults3D for $2.84 USD, making it one of the most ridiculously priced design files on the platform relative to what you actually get. The printing time is huge, the assembly takes patience, and you’ll need a lot of glue and a printer with a very large print bed if you’re going to print this thing at scale… but the community is making the pictures tell the real story here: people are finishing this building, dropping it in their living rooms, and watching their pets walk right in and claim it. The channel is always open. The show will never disappoint.