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Tess Vigeland: All right, enough with the joys of homeownership. What if you didn’t have to pay a mortgage? You could just live in a place where all you had to do was look cute and you could stay for free?

It’s what you might call a cat’s life and it’s gone designer.

From KPBS in San Diego, Andrew Phelps scratches out the story.

Andrew Phelps: Elizabeth Paige Smith lives and works in Venice, one of LA’s funky beach neighborhoods. Inside her atelier, the artist shows me her Couchette.

Elizabeth Paigh Smith: The Couchette’s a double-sided chaise. Basically, it provides a chaise on one side and then sort of a cave-like, curvilinear space on the underside for the cats to crawl and hide under there and play Hide and Go Seek.

Smith is the creator of Kittypod, designer cat furniture. Each piece is made of dense, high-grade cardboard. Kitties love to dig their claws into it. Humans love the curvy shapes and sometimes confuse them with chairs.

Smith created Kittypod 10 years ago, because everything else looked cheap — but wasn’t.

Smith: People didn’t really have any choices. I mean, you’re still spending a lot for an eyesore.

Take the Classy Kitty Deluxe Cat Tree for $170 at Petco. It’s a couple of cat caves with a giant scratching post stuck on top. And it comes in one style: beige carpet.

Compare that to one of Smith’s pieces. They can fetch up to $320, but they’re seductive: like an egg-shaped capsule with soft, cascading ridges. Smith won’t say how many she makes, but demand is so high that she now has the pieces die-cut at a local factory.

Smith: When you start add up the number of boxes and the time it takes to cut them and refine them and glue them, you know, it really adds up. I don’t find that churning out these by the bazillions is really my interest.

Of course, Smith says cats like Kittypod, too. She tries out the designs on her own cat.

Smith: Oh, he loves it. He likes all the Kittypod stuff. But he also still loves to attack my other furniture.

Smith guarantees her pieces last the life of the cat, but she can’t guarantee Kitty won’t finish off your favorite leather chair. If that’s what your cat prefers, you can always recycle Kittypod.

In San Diego, I’m Andrew Phelps for Marketplace.