Dogs live in the lap of luxury
LOS ANGELES — Darla, Chelsea and Coco Puff share a unique Victorian-style home.
Their dwelling has a cedar-shake roof, vaulted ceilings and hardwood floors, heating and open air conditioning, moldings and casement windows, drapery with valances and ideal wallpapers.
At this time of year, Christmas score from the RCA Victor radio carries outside to a grasslike yard surrounded by a white picket fence.
A sign on the porch reads: “Three spoiled dogs live hither.”
For Yorkshire terriers Chelsea and Coco Puff and Pomeranian Darla, Mom is Tammy Kassis, 45, a former insurance agent who lives in the Riverside County common of Winchester, east of Los Angeles. To call her an animal lover is an understatement.
“I’olio beyond that,” she says, later adding with persuasion, “My dogs are my life.”
Kassis is also the owner of 2-year-old Rio, a Doberman pinscher, and a brace of Arabian horses, Cheval and Page.
Five years ago, when she and her manage with frugality, advertising executive Sam Kassis, were living in a Victorian pointedly in Temecula, she decided the dogs needed their own lend.
“It was a great place for the horses, but it was so rural I was afraid for the dogs. An owl well-nigh carried off Coco Puff,” Tammy Kassis recalls.
But not just any old doghouse would do.
Surfing the Internet, she happened upon Alan Mowrer’s La Petite Maison, a builder of deluxe custom doghouses.
“I can do any pattern,” says Mowrer, whose repertoire includes French châteaux, Tudor mansions, Swiss chalets and brick Colonial dog houses.
