Just call Jennie Grant the Martha Stewart of goat sheds. The Seattle-based author of the just-released City Goats:The Goat Justice League’s Guide to Backyard Goat Keeping (Skipstone; available here) wanted a green, groovy goat palace for her companions, Snowflake and Eloise. Inspired by the stylish chicken coops of the West Coast (goats are the new poultry are the new dogs), Grant designed a state-of-the-art shed with local architect Joshua McNichols, author of The Urban Farm Handbook.
The New Doghouse is a Goat Palace
Photographs by Melany Vorass

By Laurel Miller

Photographs by Melany Vorass

Just call Jennie Grant the Martha Stewart of goat sheds. The Seattle-based author of the just-released City Goats:The Goat Justice League’s Guide to Backyard Goat Keeping (Skipstone; available here) wanted a green, groovy goat palace for her companions, Snowflake and Eloise. Inspired by the stylish chicken coops of the West Coast (goats are the new poultry are the new dogs), Grant designed a state-of-the-art shed with local architect Joshua McNichols, author of The Urban Farm Handbook.

Made from reclaimed wood and housing materials, this tidy, 60-square-foot space includes a chicken coop, feed room, milk stanchion, and a 24-square-foot rooftop deck with a view of Lake Washington. It cost about $3,000 to build.

Grant is the reason Seattle’s City Council legalized dairy goats in 2007. Thwarted in her efforts to turn her Capitol Hill backyard into a personal nano-dairy, Grant founded the Goat Justice League in 2006, to promote local food security. Today, Seattle is utterly caprine crazy, as evidenced by the number of increasingly swanky goat palaces about town.

For her girls’ digs, Grant included a deck to provide exercise and climbing capacity (a necessity for all goats, regardless of where they reside) and increase square footage. The steps, which form the manger, feed cupboard, and coop, are another example of crafty space conservation.

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