Last weekend, we had the enormous pleasure of returning to Goodwood for the 2026 Barkitecture competition at Goodwoof and we’re still smiling.
For those who haven’t followed our kennel-designing adventures, Barkitecture is an annual design competition that brings together architects, artists and designers from around the world to create one-of-a-kind dog kennels around a shared theme. The kennels are exhibited across the weekend at Goodwood, judged by a panel of celebrated names, voted on by the public (and their dogs), and then auctioned by Bonhams in aid of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. This year, sixteen entries responded to the theme: Dogs in Space. This was our fourth consecutive year entering, and we wouldn’t miss it for the world.
A Brief History of Our Kennels
Before we get to rockets, a quick trip through our previous entries. For Dogs at Work, we made an agility desk, functional, cheeky, very on-brand. For Dogs That Travel, we designed a tongue-in-cheek Louis Vuitton-esque luxury travel trunk. Then last year, for Dogs in Nature, we created a deconstructed Scandinavian plywood sheep, sculpted, playful, and deeply satisfying to build. That one won us our first People & Paws Award. So the bar was set.
ArchinautX: The Story of a Very Unlucky Re-entry
This year’s design began, as all good things do, with a Wallace & Gromit-shaped idea. §11 We imagined our office dog, Archi, blasting off into space in his own characterful rocket, a retro-futurist vessel, full of personality, built for adventure. All was going brilliantly until Archi, hurtling through the cosmos, happened to spot that the Goodwoof Festival was about to begin down at Goodwood. Being a dog of excellent priorities, he immediately changed course and made for Earth at maximum speed. The landing was… enthusiastic.
ArchinautX is the result: a bright orange, slightly tilted rocket dog bed in plywood, complete with portholes, an engine aperture, and all the hallmarks of a craft that arrived in a hurry. It sits somewhere between Scandinavian furniture design and a NASA mission report filed under unexpected outcomes. It is beautiful, bonkers, and we think, exactly what a space-travelling dog would want to sleep in. The fabrication was led by the brilliant Moke Wall, who brought the design to life with exceptional craft and care. As always, the whole studio was involved in the process from early sketches and physical models through to the finished piece. That collaborative energy is one of our favourite things about doing this.
The Judges, the Judging, and a Very Agile Astronaut
This year’s judging panel was, frankly, spectacular: Kevin McCloud MBE (Grand Designs), Bill Bailey, Tim Peake CMG (astronaut and former ISS crew member), Michelle Ogundehin (Interior Design Masters), and our personal favourite addition to any judging panel, Séamus, Regimental Mascot of the Irish Guards. Every year, we try to design something the judges can interact with, not just admire. Last year, Bill Bailey gamely climbed into our Scandinavian sheep. This year, we invited him to attempt the rocket. He gave it a go; we admire the commitment but couldn’t quite make it work. Tim Peake, however, had absolutely no such difficulties. With the kind of physical ease you’d expect from someone who has spent months on the International Space Station, he hopped straight inside ArchinautX and popped his head neatly out of the engine hole. It was one of the best things we’ve seen at the competition. Ever.
People & Paws — Again
We’re genuinely thrilled to share that ArchinautX won the People & Paws Award, the public vote cast by visitors and their dogs across the weekend. This is the second year in a row we’ve won it (last year’s sheep took it home too), and it means a huge amount to us. It’s the purest possible feedback: real people, and their actual dogs, choosing their favourite.
The Auction
When Sunday afternoon came around and the Bonhams auctioneer took to the floor, things got exciting. Both Tim Peake and Bill Bailey placed bids on ArchinautX, which, whatever else happened, is a sentence we never expected to write. In the end, ArchinautX sold for £3,500, the highest price achieved in the auction, second only to the LEGO Group’s entry, the U-Woof-O, which fetched £4,500. All proceeds go to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, and we’re enormously proud to have contributed to that.
Why We Do It
People sometimes ask why a practice that designs homes, extensions, listed building projects and new builds also has what we can only describe as a side hustle in bespoke dog kennels. It’s a fair question. The honest answer is that it gives us something genuinely rare: a rapid, joyful design process with almost total creative freedom. Designing buildings, whether a new home, a sensitive refurbishment, or a listed building application is a rich and rewarding process, but it’s a long one. From first conversation to finished building, you’re often talking about months or years. A kennel goes from sketch to reality in around four to five months, and the only client is a dog. Dogs, it turns out, are excellent clients. They have strong opinions about feeling secure, about tucking in, about the specific pleasure of a good den. They don’t have views on planning policy or fenestration ratios. They just want somewhere warm and interesting to sleep. It sharpens your instincts. It’s also closely related to work we do for our clients every day. We design bespoke furniture, fitted joinery, kitchens and cabinetry as part of our residential projects, so the thinking isn’t foreign to us. Barkitecture just gives us licence to push it somewhere more sculptural, more playful, and frankly more fun. And it gets the whole team involved. Modelling, making, problem-solving, everyone contributes, and that energy carries back into everything else we do.
The Only Problem
Archi, our office dog and the namesake of ArchinautX, loves the arrival of each new kennel. He moves in immediately. He inspects every porthole. He settles in as though it was always his. And then it gets sold, and he watches it go. We’ve been saying for a few years that one day we’ll make him one to keep. We think 2026 might finally be the year we make good on that promise.
What’s Next
In the autumn, Goodwoof will announce next year’s theme and when they do, we’ll be straight back to the drawing board for kennel number five. The fact that we can say that without irony, as a practice that designs people’s homes and loves doing it, tells you everything you need to know about what Barkitecture means to us. We’ve loved sharing the journey with you this year on social media, in our newsletter, and here. If you want to see ArchinautX in full, alongside our previous entries, they are all on our website. And if you happened to be at Goodwoof last weekend: thank you for your vote. Archi, and the whole team, really appreciated it.
All proceeds from the Barkitecture auction go to Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. The Barkitecture competition is curated by Kevin McCloud MBE and the Goodwood team.
