Dog hotel offers top-paw lodging

Lisa Ferrerio took great pains to give each room at the small hotel she runs a cheerful theme.

There's the Lodge Room, with its stuffed moose and plaid blankets. There's the Las Vegas Room, with cards scattered about and those famous poker-playing dogs on the wall. There's the Wizard of Oz Room, the Jungle Room, the Flintstones Room -- all decorated appropriately.

One particularly popular accommodation is the Cruise Room, with its under-the-sea motif.

"A lot of times, when people go on cruises, they'll book this room," says Ferrerio. "They like their dog to experience what they're experiencing."

Yes, her guests at the Westminster, Colo., facility are all dogs. In an earlier time, pet owners going out of town may have reserved a cage at a kennel for their dog for the duration. But Ferrerio's The Dog and I is to a kennel what Denver's posh Brown Palace hotel is to a, well, pup tent. The Dog and I is no fleabag hotel. It provides top- paw accommodations for dogs who are used to pampering.

In all, there are 16 individual rooms and two suites. The rooms -- about the size of a standard bathroom -- give overnight guests a soft bed and a private place to chill out, if being with a lot of other dogs gets too stressful.

The suites -- as large as some hotel rooms -- can accommodate multiple dogs and come equipped with couches for lounging, plus a TV and a DVD player. "Lion King" was playing the afternoon we visited.

"It's for the dog that really wants to be pampered," Ferrerio says of the suites, "or for a family of four or five dogs that want to all be in the same room."

Out front, the overnight guests can mingle with the day-care dogs. Ferrerio and her family have converted a large space in a strip mall into an inviting play area for dogs, divided into sections for large and small dogs. There's a dog run outside. The day-care dogs are just as pampered as the overnighters. They get to watch TV, go for walks.

"Sometimes we have crafts. For Father's Day, we made paw prints in clay as a gift for their fathers. Otherwise, it's the normal ball- throwing, and a lot of Kong," Ferrerio says, referring to the popular rubber chew toy made by a Denver company.

All in all, it's not how you'd expect someone like Lisa Ferrerio to be spending her life.

In the first place, she's an engineer. She graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a degree in mechanical engineering and had a good job with Sun Microsystems.

"I did that for six or seven years," says Ferrerio, 28. "But it's just not what I wanted to do. My first love is animals."

That love of animals is understandable, given her 15 years of friendship with Kosmo, her service dog. Ferrerio was born with a condition commonly known as brittle-bone disease, and she's spent her entire life in a wheelchair. She's had more than 100 broken bones in her life and undergone eight major surgeries. Her inspiration through all of that was Kosmo, who she got at age 13.

"Kosmo went to college with me!" she says. "He was a smart dog."

Kosmo passed away just last year. Now Ferrerio has a new best friend and business partner, a St. Bernard named Pythagoras, who helps run the place.

Ferrerio finally decided that life is too short to spend stuck in a career that isn't fulfilling. She first toyed with the notion of opening a dog hotel years ago, way before dog day cares popped up in nearly every community in the city. "I've just always thought that dogs didn't need to stay in metal cages," she says. "Dogs should have nice places to stay, too."

She hunted around, did some market research, determined there was nothing else in the city quite like what she envisioned -- and then leaped into it.

Her family leaped with her. Her mother, Diane Holstein, quit her job as a store manager for Lens Crafters to come on board as dog walker. Her stepfather, Alan Holstein, also left behind an engineering career. He gets breakfast ready for the dogs in the morning, spends much of the day there, and has a small business designing custom dog houses on the side.

"I like hanging with Lisa," he says. "And I was getting tired. I was an engineer for 30 years. It was time to do something different, and my family was more important to me."

"I think it's because we're just all crazy," Diane Holstein says of the six-days-a-week, 12-hours-a-day schedule this family business entails. "It was a big move for all of us. But Lisa had her head on straight. She did the research. And if she thinks she can make a go of this, then we're all behind her."

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