Kinobori

1. 1,250 mm tall - high enough to meet your cat at eye level
2. Branch-like steps that support real climbing
3. Dimensions decided by watching cats, over months of prototypes
4. Japanese walnut from Tohoku, finished by a Takayama craftsman
5. Solid wood, one of a kind in its knots and grain
6. No fabric anywhere - solid wood that lasts over ten years
7. Assembles with a single screw
8. Levelling feet for tatami or hard floors

Climbing the room
the way they climb a tree.

Cats need height. Knowing that is one thing; putting a cat tower into a room you have spent years getting right is another. KINOBORI began with the idea that you shouldn't have to give up either one.
The form came from trees. Walking the walls, jumping, stopping to look outside - indoors, a cat moves almost exactly the way it would climb.
The wood is Japanese walnut from Tohoku, from managed forestry. It is finished in a workshop in Takayama, Gifu, by a furniture maker who has worked with wood for nearly fifty years, over more than six months from first sketch to finished piece. There is no fabric and no sisal rope anywhere on it. Somewhere for your cat, and a piece of furniture you will still want in the room in ten years.

1,250 mm - the height where your eyes meet.

The top platform sits at 1,250 mm (49 in). Not looking up, not crouching down: standing normally, you simply meet each other's eyes. The tail that swings on every landing, the back turned to the window - all of it stays inside your line of sight.

Branch-like steps that catch the climb.

Five round steps, set at staggered heights and angles, the way branches leave a trunk. Rather than running straight up, your cat twists and circles its way to the top. The top platform is 34 cm across, the middle steps 26 to 29 cm - room enough to fold into a loaf and rest.

Six months of asking the cats.

Build a prototype, then let real cats use it. Is the height frightening? Does it wobble? Do their feet slip on the tread? Watch, cut it back, try again. That went on for more than six months. "I couldn't compromise on it, so we tested it again and again until the shape finally felt right." Every riser height and every tread size came out of that process.

Made one at a time in Hida-Takayama.

The workshop is in Takayama, Gifu - a town known throughout Japan for woodworking. The maker became a craftsman straight out of high school and has spent nearly fifty years with wood. He chose Japanese walnut from managed forestry in Tohoku: "The grain is gentle, and there's a softness to it. I chose it for how it sits with the rest of a room." From cutting to the natural oil finish, each piece is made by hand.

Every knot and every grain is its own.

Where the knots fall, how the grain runs, how light or dark the tone is. Even cut from the same tree, no two boards of solid wood look alike. The one that arrives carries a grain no other has. It is a material worth looking at even in the hours your cat is asleep somewhere else.

Ten years, not two.

Towers wrapped in carpet or sisal trap shed hair in the fibres where you can't get it out, then fray, and often need replacing every few years. KINOBORI is solid wood throughout. "It's wood, so you'll get more than ten years out of it," the maker says. Hair brushes straight off; marks wipe away with a well-wrung cloth.

Re-oil it, and it keeps getting better.

Once every six to twelve months, a coat of ordinary furniture oil deepens the colour and lets small scratches settle in. Your cat goes from kitten to adult; the wood changes over the same years, in the same room.

One screw, and it's done.

It arrives in two parts, upper and lower, and assembly is a single thick screw. One person can put it together without help. Six levelling feet on the base let you get it flat on tatami or on an apartment floor, and the 11 kg (24 lb) weight keeps it steady when your cat lands on it.

Three &CAT places to be. Choose by your cat.

For a cat that wants to survey the room from above, the KINOBORI tower. For one that wants to be enclosed, there is the HÜTTE house. For one that wants to sink in and sprawl, the MALTA bed.

By then, the wood will have changed too.

Climbed on daily, caught by claws, sitting in the light. Ten years from now, the time you spent with your cat will still be on this piece. Choose the thing you won't have to replace, at the start. That is what KINOBORI is for.

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