Lewisville's Future Cat Cafe Launches $30K Kickstarter Campaign

The race is on to see who will open DFW's first cat cafe. While a cat cafe for the downtown area is still in the early planning stages, a feline-friendly coffee shop in the works for the suburbs seems to be a bit further along: Lewisville's Charming Cat Cafe has a full-fledged business plan and is in the process of picking out a space, and now it just needs some cold hard cash.

The cafe, which will be home to adoptable kitties from Lewisville Animal Services and a nonprofit cat rescue group Kitty Save, is hoping to raise $30,000 via Kickstarter for initial buildout and equipment costs. The cafe promises "a sleek, simple, modern room" where patrons can have coffee, tea, and snacks while waiting to enter the "cat lounge," a separate area divided from the cafe by a hallway. (This will act as "an 'air lock' to prevent cats from dashing into the cafe or out the front door," and presumably also to keep cat hair out of your latte.)

Meanwhile in the cat lounge, patrons will find felines "lounging in cat trees, climbing the 'catified' walls, working on the cat scratchers, making their way along the walk-about, coming over for a play session, or letting you admire them in their naps." There will be free wifi for humans, as well as "an air circulation/purification system in the cat lounge to purge air every hour and flush fresh air in." Charming Cat also intends to pay its staff "scalable living wages ... not just minimum wage."

Leading the charge for Charming Cat is Bev Freed, who has a decade of coordinating cat rescues and adoptions under her belt. Freed says she's been pursuing the cat cafe idea for over a year, and has the full support of the city of Lewisville. Once they raise the necessary funds to built out the cat cafe, she estimates it could be open within a couple months.