Forget the $800 Scandinavian pet cave or the linen-covered cube that your cat ignores in favor of your laptop bag. The most genuinely entertaining piece of pet furniture to cross my feed this year is a 3D-printed house shaped like a vintage CRT television, and the entire joke is that your pet becomes the programming. You sit on the couch. You watch the TV. The TV contains a cat. This is better than anything currently streaming. Designer burnski uploaded the STL pack to Cults3D in January, and the community has been printing it in color combinations ranging from dark grey with cyan accents to warm brown with blush pink ever since, each build landing in someone’s living room like the world’s most wholesome conversation piece.
The file set runs to 39 components, assembles with a dry-fit connector system and superglue, and requires a print bed of at least 240 x 240 x 240mm to pull off at full scale. The form is pitch-perfect: four tapered legs, two ball-tipped rabbit-ear antennas, three knurled channel knobs, a honeycomb speaker grille, and a wide rounded-rectangle screen opening that your cat, dog, or rabbit walks through and promptly falls asleep inside. Community makes already show cats curled up in the screen cavity like they are the most relaxed broadcast in television history, which, honestly, they are.
Designer: burnski
The design language burnski landed on is pure 1960s broadcast era, the kind of chunky, corner-rounded CRT silhouette that populated every American living room before flatscreens made televisions invisible. That specific form carries enormous nostalgic weight right now, showing up on tote bags, neon signs, and enamel pins everywhere you look, but burnski is one of the few people who has taken it somewhere genuinely functional. The rounded body, the splayed legs, the antennas, none of these are decorative afterthoughts. They are load-bearing elements of a visual joke that only works if every detail commits. A CRT pet house with stubby legs and no antennas is just a box with a hole in it. This one reads as a television from across the room, which is the whole point.
Thirty-nine individual STL files cover every component from the outer casing panels, split into eight sections labeled 1A through 2D for assembly sequencing, to the antenna mounting blocks, the knob faces, and the front and rear ventilation grilles. The connector system is built directly into the parts, so the dry-fit assembly process is essentially self-guiding before you reach for the superglue. Burnski recommends two or three filament colors, minimum two walls, and ten percent infill for most structural components, with support material only required under the monitor section. The rear ventilation panels and front grille inlays get a special tip in the build notes: flatten them in your slicer, zero out the top and bottom layers, and the exposed infill pattern becomes a design feature. Community makers have used gyroid and honeycomb infill patterns to striking effect on these panels, visible in the finished build photos circulating on Cults3D.
Given the fact that you’re 3D printing this, you can choose from a variety of colors. The grey-and-cyan version that burnski’s own build photos show is clean and almost graphic, the kind of colorway that would not look out of place in a design-forward apartment. However, you aren’t limited to that – go wild with pastels or neons, or just stick to a single-color print if you’re constrained by filaments and then paint designs/patterns onto it later. It’s ultimately a pet-house, so remember to use paints that are safe and non-toxic.
You can play around with scale to make sure the shelter fits your pet. At 1:1 scale, a full-grown cat fits inside the screen cavity with room to curl up comfortably, which means the assembled unit is genuinely substantial, closer in presence to a bedside table than to a desktop decorative object. That scale is also what makes the living-room-television joke land in person rather than just in photographs. A miniature version would be cute if you own a tinier pet. A version large enough for an actual animal to live inside, sitting on four legs at floor level while you watch it from the couch, is something else entirely.
The STL pack is available on Cults3D for $2.84 USD, making it one of the more absurdly good-value design files on the platform relative to what you actually get. The print time is substantial, the assembly requires patience, and you will need superglue and a printer with a fairly large print-bed if you’re going to print this thing at scale… but the community make photos tell the real story here: people are finishing this build, dropping it in their living rooms, and watching their pets walk straight in and claim it. The channel is always on. The programming never disappoints.
The post This 3D-Printed Pet House Looks Like a Retro TV That Lets You Watch Your Cat Sleep Instead Of Netflix first appeared on Yanko Design.
