FOUR-legged visitors to a luxury kennel at Colletts Green can look forward to scrambled eggs for breakfast, showers, beds with under-floor heating and two-hour walks every day.
The business also stocks products that pampered pooches would love to get their paws into this Christmas.
Doggy delicacies created by Marjorie and Craig Walsh at Lucies Farm include Christmas pudding, haddock ice cream and even personalised birthday cakes.
“We appeal to people who aren’t worried about their credit card limit,” said Mr Walsh. “In hotel terms you can’t provide people with Savoy or Ritz service for Travel Lodge prices.”
Five privileged canines are coming from London to stay at Lucies Farm over Christmas, with one due to arrive by limousine.
They will be fed on Marjorie’s homemade dog food, which she flash freezes, sells via the internet and dispatches overnight to customers.
The beef used in the food comes from a herd of Scottish cattle raised in the Japanese Kobe style to give the meat extra tenderness and flavour.
This means the cattle get regular massages, beer from St George’s Brewery in Callow End and feeds of grain, although they are allowed to roam free and not kept indoors like their Japanese counterparts.
“I think the meat tastes better if the cow is happier,” said Craig.
The Walshs started keeping cattle in 1992 and the foot and mouth crisis in 2003 led to them raising them in the Kobe style.
Craig said they could no longer sell cattle as pets because people did not want to deal with the paperwork involved and he could not stand raising cattle just to see them burnt at the end of their lives.
The best cuts of meat are sold for eating and Marjorie came up with the idea for the dog food business as a way to use leftover joints.
She uses special software to ensure their dog products are nutritionally balanced and edible for humans, although Marjorie said the dog food was fatty to give dogs energy.
She has two willing employees to taste test her products – her own dogs Tapa and Kiko.
The photographs
These were taken for a book on kennel design, which ran a four-page spread on the Lucies Farm dog hotel. We sent the publisher the best we had, shot at full resolution for print. They have not been seen since.
