Yes, it’s possible to have both a chic interior and four-legged friends. Designers share their hard-won workarounds.
2 min
I UNDERSTAND the pet-owner’s decor dilemma. When my roommate and I fostered two kittens, a toxic cycle began. Though our new friends knocked framed posters off the wall at night, the next morning Betty and Brontë’s innocent eyes would disarm me and I’d drop kisses on their tiny foreheads. But must “fur babies” condemn a homeowner to tarp-clad sofas and plastic vases? No, say pet-owning interior designers.
New York designer Ghislaine Viñas’s tip: Roll out dark-colored rugs with intricate patterns to hide slobber, mud and piddle accidents. Jaipur Living’s Poeme design would pass Atlanta designer Cate Dunning’s “meatball test,” which asks: Would a meatball dropped on the rug disappear? If so, bring on the paws.
Thick, natural weaves like wool and seagrass weather house-training accidents well. Avoid sisal, says New York designer Bunny Williams. Though handsome and textured, it easily absorbs moisture, making spot cleaning a chore, she says. Performance materials such as polypropylene hold up well, says Keren Richter, principal designer of Manhattan firm White Arrow, but she steers clear of viscose, a delicate semi-synthetic material prone to shedding.
Pets’ claws catch easily in loose weaves like bouclé, and cats especially can’t resist them. Richter tests a textile’s suitability with a paper clip. Unfold the metal and run the jagged end against a fabric. If it snags, the material won’t survive a cat’s talons. Mohair and velvet pass this test, the designer has found.
Nicole Fuller’s two Maine Coons, Monty and Punk, besieged her herringbone linen sofa, “hanging from it by their claws,” she said. The New York designer reupholstered the couch in Dedar’s Klein blue cotton velvet—tightly woven and durable. As for leather, cats’ claws will shred it, but paw marks and the oil from dogs’ coats can be passed off as “patina.”
Viñas endorses performance fabrics for upholstery as they “ensure the highest level of durability.” Sunbrella offers solution-dyed acrylic that repels water and stains and holds up against the oil and dirt from dogs’ coats, says Richter. Fuller, who finds some performance fabrics too rough, relies on luxurious European outdoor fabric from Loro Piana and Pierre Frey .
For shedding fur, Richter suggests the ultimate camouflage: a sofa that matches your pet’s colouring. “Sometimes, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” she said.
Alternatively, Williams tucks throws into armchairs and wraps sofa cushions in blankets. After years with her cat and two terrier mixes, she’s found that faux fur blankets and cotton block-printed Indian fabrics endure, wash easily and appear intentional. “Make sure that it still looks like a chair that someone can sit in and not just the dog’s chair [or sofa],” Williams said.
Fuller collects Murano glassware and loves lit candlesticks. Uncompromising, she presses Stick-Um putty to the bottoms of both so her cats can’t topple them. Richter deploys museum gel , a special adhesive, for wobbly curios.
Plants can be hung out of reach of digging dogs and mischievous cats, says Geraldine James, author of “Cool Dogs, Cool Homes” (CICO, 2023). If you like your plants earthbound, the website Plants for Pet Parents sells plants the ASPCA deems not toxic to pets.
As for the slew of chew toys, corral them in a container that compliments your interior—whether that’s a folksy gingham-lined basket or IKEA’s mod dandelion-yellow wire bin .
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AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
