We spend hours choosing the right sofa, agonising over light fixtures, and repaint a wall three times to get the perfect shade of white. Every piece of furniture in our homes is considered, selected, deliberated over.
For years, dog products existed in a separate category. Purely functional, rarely beautiful, almost never designed to integrate with how we actually live. The Fable Crate was created to change that.
The New York Times Wirecutter named it their pick for Best Furniture Crate of 2025, and it appears constantly on design blogs, in interiors magazines and across Instagram. When the design launched it generated a waitlist of more than 20,000 people. So what got people so excited?
Founders Sophie Bakalar and Jeremy Canade, siblings and dog owners living in small flats in New York, wanted a crate that could exist in their home as furniture. So they built one with clean lines, a minimal aesthetic and warm wood tones.
Beyond the aesthetics, the material itself makes a difference. Wood absorbs sound rather than amplifying it, so there’s none of the rattling or metal-on-metal scraping that comes with wire crates, which matters for noise sensitive dogs. Not only that, studies show that wooden furniture in our homes can trigger a biophilic response in our bodies, which is an innate human tendency to seek out nature and natural materials. The effect of this response is a decrease in the sympathetic nervous system’s activity, reduced cortisol and help people feel calmer and more positive.
It was designed to mimic a natural den, mimicking the enclosed spaces dogs instinctively seek while still letting them see the room around them. Research supports the idea that calmer environments help dogs settle faster and sleep more soundly, and the design leans into that throughout.
It’s definitely an investment piece, but at MUTTS, we believe in shopping with the mindset that a product built to last a lifetime is worth the craftsmanship that goes into it. The crate is crafted with bentwood construction, the same method behind mid-century modern classics, where wood is steamed, bent into shape, and left to set, giving it both strength and elegance.
Dog products are changing, slowly but noticeably, and more brands are starting to ask why pet gear shouldn’t be as considered as everything else we bring into our homes. The Fable Crate sits at the front of that shift.
