GROOM YOUR DEAREST ‘MASTER’ IN THIS PET WELLNESS CENTER WHERE EVERY DETAIL IS DESIGNED TO SERVE YOUR MATE THE BEST
TEXT: SUTEE NAKARAKORNKUL
PHOTO: THANAWATCHU
(For Thai, press here)
After receiving an overwhelming amount of positive feedback from the pet lover clientele, Hato Pet Wellness Center, a comprehensive facility for ‘your pets’ enhanced quality of life’ sited in the community mall TRAIL and TAIL located on Sukhumvit 29 street now opens its new branch at Central Festival EastVille. With this latest addition, the center brings to fore the image of a ‘pet spa,’ as the highlight of its service program. Maincourse, the design team assigned for the project translates the concept into an interior decoration with the mood and tone of a Japanese onsen. 
With a rather limited space for the center’s functional program, which includes the waiting area, the health examination rooms, shower rooms, spa and grooming rooms, Maincourse begins the design process with analyses on all the required functionalities and users’ behaviors (both humans and animals). The analyzed data is used to indicate the functional spaces’s varying scales. “Each section has specific functionalities but they all have a relatively similar height. Once we were informed about such connection, we incorporated all these functions into a vertically imposed program and optimized the use of these overlapped spaces.”
Maincourse told us that the upside of working with a retail space inside a shopping mall is the amount of vertical spaces the site has to offer. Nevertheless, the construction of a mezzanine or an additional floor is often prohibited, leading the design team to maximize the use of vertical spaces through the creation of ‘architecture in an interior space’. The approach ends up layering the interior program in the form of multi-floor levels and simultaneously hiding the floor elevation since the space wasn’t specifically designed to comprehensively accommodate the center’s interior service systems.
The animals’ happiness and wellness is the design’s first priority. The design teams decided to avoid a window display storefront with the consideration that it can be the cause of stress for the four-legged clients. Wood is the principal material of the interior decor, and can be found in the reception area where the natural material does its job in creating a warm, relaxing and welcoming vibe. A nice contrast to the wood’s natural brown is the white of examination rooms’ walls whose clean surface is also functionally beneficial to the veterinarians’ operations.
For the shower room zone, the design team came up with bathtubs with adjustable foundations. Placed near each tub is a Hinoki wood panel, which becomes fragrant when wet. The tubs come in S / M / L sizes to accommodate various sizes of the animals receiving the service. To keep the pets focused on the activity they currently engaging in as well as to provide a sense of privacy, small openings are made for owners to peek through while their pets are being taken care of. Located towards the rear of the space is the operation room where minor surgeries can be performed.
There are few other details of the design that are indicative of the collaborative effort between the design team and Hato Pet Wellness Center. One of the examples is the complete separation between the dog quarter and the cat quarter since the design team is aware of the immediate anxiety that cats get when hearing the dogs’ barking noises. The installation of the timber screens in the dog boarding zone helps the dogs to sleep better as well. Meanwhile, the cat boarding quarter on the upper floor and cat grooming room have the addition of cute little details with cat windows that the felines can peep through and observe people walking by, or the circular glass openings where the animals love to lay around in, popping out and presenting their lovely presence and saying hello to the clients waiting on the floor below.
To think that dogs and cats have an approximate lifespan of 15 years, which means their time goes by five times faster than humans, we as owners want nothing but to spend everyday making our masters happy because at the end of the day, the best gift we could ever ask for from our pets is nothing more than maintaining good health.
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