San Francisco’s new cage-free dog shelter is a colorful utopia for older dogs

Stepping into the new Muttville senior dog rescue is like entering a fantastical alternate reality. There’s a pink-tiled glam room covered in bespoke wallpaper, a kitchen that resembles an Italian café, offices designed like Victorian houses, and an outdoor courtyard bedazzled with mural art. And, throughout it all, senior rescue dogs roam as their hearts desire. 

The new location, which officially opened in early September, reimagines the dog shelter as an exciting destination rather than a dreary necessity. The rescue is using clever functional design and whimsical aesthetic details, contributed by celebrity designer Ken Fulk, to draw guests in and boost adoption rates. It also pushes Muttville’s initial conceit—a cage-free shelter for senior dogs—further with an expanded, open concept that invites shelter visitors to question the familiar, by reinventing the design of shelters altogether.

CEO Sherri Franklin founded Muttville in 2007, and initially ran it from her own home. She’d developed the Muttville shelter, California’s first-ever senior dog rescue, as a way to save the lives of older dogs who might otherwise be euthanized. In 2011, she moved the shelter into its first official location and achieved another landmark: creating the country’s first cage-free dog rescue. At Muttville, senior residents aren’t confined to individual cages, but instead move between the shelter’s various rooms (separate rooms are designated for dogs who need more solitude, large breeds, and those who aren’t spayed or neutered).

This radical approach has been a “major success,” says Franklin. To date, Muttville has saved more than 12,000 dogs and brings in about 100 dogs per week, which is more than most shelters in the area. But after outgrowing their former location in an office building, Franklin has been dreaming up an even more boundary-pushing iteration.

Designing a better dog shelter

Typically, dog shelters follow a standard setup. The general practice is to allow guests to enter into a front lobby area while the dogs are kept in a back room in parallel rows of metal cages. According to Franklin, this structure tends to be accepted as a best practice and replicated in new shelters. But she firmly believes it’s possible, and necessary, to imagine something better that’s “welcoming for both dogs and humans.”

“Our dream was to make a place where people wanted to go,” Franklin says. “When you think of going to an animal shelter to find a dog, it’s stressful, it’s depressing, the dogs are all barking, you don’t get to touch them, they’re behind glass or metal doors. When you walk into Muttville, you walk into a space that is really magical.”

Since 2020, Franklin’s team has been navigating city ordinances, the pandemic, and countless design challenges to build the new Muttville. After the initial architect Franklin hired came back with a layout that mimicked the standard shelter setup, Franklin realized she’d need to find an architect who didn’t actually specialize in shelters in order to execute the outside-the-box plan that worked so well at Muttville’s first shelter.

Laying out a dog campus

The final product is less a dog shelter and more a dog campus. It includes three buildings linked by an open-air courtyard (which, of course, is accessible to the dogs, and even comes with its own fire hydrant). The first building is a fully equipped vet clinic with an X-ray machine, surgery suite, and dental tables.

Next door is the Home of New Beginnings, where dogs who have just arrived at the shelter can have some time to relax, receive a grooming service, and get their website photos taken. The main building is the Adoption Center, an open space for visitors to meet dogs, which includes a play area, plenty of luxe human-size furniture, and staff offices (also a favorite hangout among the senior pups). 

From a practical standpoint, the shelter’s interiors have been designed to minimize stress on dogs, visitors, and neighbors alike. Franklin worked with acoustical engineers to ensure that sound wouldn’t travel outside the shelter or between spaces within it. “We don’t have a lot of barking dogs, but all it takes is one beagle, and you’re in trouble,” she jokes. An HVAC system throughout the property ensures a strong air flow to minimize smells. And, Franklin says, choosing the right flooring for cleaning messes was an “all-day conversation.

“I see this as the future of animal sheltering,” Franklin says of the shelter’s open-design concept. “Yes, you probably are going to need some kennels for animals that can’t be together, and different dogs do have different needs, but making it a space where people want to come and hang out [is critical].”

Sparing no detail: A doggie glam room, acupuncture, and art

Beyond its pup-friendly layout, Muttville’s new location truly shines with its attention-to-detail. No area of the shelter has gone without a special touch, including the rooms that are less public-facing. In the Home of New Beginnings, there’s a Zen Room with a softly burbling water feature that welcomes dogs to their new home, alongside volunteer acupuncturists (yes, for the dogs) and Reiki practitioners to help anxious arrivals relax. Then, they get their coats groomed in the Glam Shampoochery, which has been designed like a retro barber shop, complete with custom dog wallpaper and pink tiling. 

The Adoption Center features a green-accented Italian café-looking kitchen, and staff offices are designed after the iconic Painted Ladies, San Francisco’s famous row of pastel-colored Victorian houses. Fulk, whose design portfolio includes the swanky Crown Club at New York City’s Barclays Center and Boston’s private social club the ‘Quin House, spearheaded the upscale furnishings, wallpaper, and decor throughout this new Muttville.

A long list of local artists donated artwork and murals for inside and outside the shelter. “I call it the love letter to San Francisco,” Franklin says.

Building community to give dogs a fresh start

So far, the shelter has already attracted plenty of locals and tourists—even a group who traveled all the way from Istanbul, Franklin says. Muttville is also encouraging greater community connection through dog yoga, movie nights, and a social club for (human) seniors, which has become so popular that it now meets twice weekly rather than once monthly.

“It’s really created this wonderful synergy among people who really had no community,” says Franklin. “There was this one volunteer who would come in frowning, and the minute you put a dog in his lap, he’s smiling, talking to the person next to him.”

Once the chaos of the move-in process winds down, Franklin plans to dedicate her time to teaching other shelters about Muttville’s model and helping them avoid some of the mistakes the shelter made in its early days. Ultimately, she says, the main goal of the new Muttville shelter will always be finding homes for as many senior dogs as possible. 

“Muttville is in the business of saving lives, and if we aren’t doing that, we are not succeeding,” Franklin says.