In the Doghouse Deluxe

They are panting over the latest housing designs at a three-day architecture and interior decorating conference in West Hollywood.

You’d expect plenty of panting, of course, around oghouses.

Except that the pet shelters that some of Los Angeles’ top designers were sniffing around Wednesday in the center lobby of the Pacific Design Center cost as much as $10,000 to build.

Created by architects, interior designers, movie set decorators and artists, the 46 doghouses will be auctioned April 23 to raise money for a nonprofit group that cares for the pets of AIDS patients.

“Fabulous. These are simply fabulous,” said Sasha Furman, a Los Angeles educator who is among the 15,000 people attending the “Westweek ‘98” conference. Furman was admiring a tent-like “Arabian Nights” doghouse outfitted with a genuine Persian rug by interior designer David White.

“It makes me wish I had a dog,” Furman said.

Animals aren’t a necessary accessory for these doghouses, however.

“I doubt if dogs will ever see them,” admitted Bret Parsons, a design industry executive who helped organize the auction to benefit Pets Are Wonderful Support.

“Two years ago when we did this, a lady bought one as a playhouse for her daughter,” he said. “People look at these more as art, as sculpture than as doghouses.”

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Indeed. Artist Alison Saar’s corrugated-roof doghouse mimics her own style of assemblage art. “Dogousian Gallery,” the skylight-lit doghouse that artist Laddie John Dill designed to resemble an art gallery, has walls lined with tiny oil portraits of dogs done by painter Christophe Cassidy.

Miniature dogs astride tiny stools can be seen through small windows in the doghouse resembling a Western saloon that interior designer Maxine White built. Architect Tom Farrage used fiberglass to construct a 9-foot-tall doghouse that has room in the middle for a cat--and a birdhouse at the top.

Movie prop makers and set designers have contributed several of the more elaborate doghouses.

A plastic spaceship-like dome equipped with paw-sized buttons that dogs can press to control a miniature TV set, a fan, interior lights and a motorized door was built by prop makers John Zabrucky, Mark Robinson and Mike Ladish. It took three weeks to build.

“I see it being used more as something like a liquor cabinet than a doghouse,” another prop maker, Bruce Giddens, said.

A doghouse made of fiberglass “sandbags” to resemble a military bunker is outfitted with mock guns, knives, hand grenades and bombs. A make-believe vulture peering through binoculars sits atop a flashing arrow that beckons cats to a box of cat food attached to the bunker by set decorators from Wilcox Studio Props.

Next to it is a doghouse built by a design collective called Hedge that is made from shrubs. Conference attendee Elizabeth Kellen was debating whether to make a minimum $250 bid on it.

“My fox terrier would love it. But she’d probably destroy it,” said Kellen, a Los Angeles furniture designer.

Other doghouses were designed to be replicas of Mexican adobes, the famed Phillip Johnson “Glass House,” Chinese homes, a tiny nylon tent, a treasure chest, a grass-roofed log cabin and Dorothy’s house in “The Wizard of Oz.” It featured a yellow brick road made of dog biscuits and a wire-framed “tornado” ripping part of its roof off.

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Gai Gherardi, co-owner of l.a. Eyeworks, built a duplex doghouse resembling giant eyeglasses. She said it cost about $6,000 to construct and then finish with special car paint.

Interior designer Shari Canepa said three of her staff members spent three days on the disco-like doghouse she dubbed “Lassie’s Lounge, a bitchin’ club.”

Merry Norris, an art consultant who helped stage the doghouse show, said as much as $100,000 could be raised through the auction. The sale two years ago raised $40,000.

“The designers . . . will tell me they didn’t realize it was going to take so much time or so cost so much money,” Norris said.

But, doggone it, “they seriously thank me for inviting them.”