Zara has a pet collection. It is buried under the “lifestyle” tab of Zara Home’s dropdown, filed somewhere near the stationery and the books, and you essentially have to already know it exists to find it.
It is also very good-looking, in a specific way: every piece but one is beige, everything is photographed with the deadly seriousness of a perfume campaign, and the overall effect is less “pet store” than “Montessori influencer’s entryway.”
The thing nobody writing about it seems willing to say is that being nice-looking and being a good object for an animal to use are two different tests, and this collection passes one of them much more reliably than the other. So let us sort it by the test that matters.
The rule that decides everything
Before price, before aesthetics: can it be washed, and can it survive being chewed?
That is not a fussy standard. It is the entire useful lifespan of a pet product. A dog bed that cannot go in a machine is a dog bed with a six-month clock on it. A toy made of loose fiber is not a toy, it is a foreign body waiting to be swallowed.
Almost everything Zara sells here is soft goods: cushions, beds, blankets, and toys, most of it built from natural fibers like linen and cotton wrapped around polyester fill. Natural fibers photograph beautifully and are not remotely the most durable choice for something an animal will lie on, drool into, and occasionally attack.
“The toys I worry about are never the loud plastic ones, they’re the pretty woven ones,” says Dr. Priya Nair. “Rope, crochet, and macramé shed long strands, and a long strand in a dog’s gut is the kind of obstruction that turns into surgery. Linear foreign bodies are their own category of bad.”
Keep that in mind for the next section, because it is the single most consequential thing in this collection.
The good buys
The pet beds are the reason to shop here. This is where the collection actually earns its keep. The current lineup runs to a faux shearling pet bed, a pet basket bed, a seagrass pet bed, and a pet house, most sitting well under $100. The plush bed with raised sides is a genuinely nice object at $129, which is a real price but not an unhinged one for a bolster bed a dog will use every night for years. Raised sides matter, by the way, and not for looks: dogs and cats both sleep better with something to press their spine against.
The one to lust after is the rattan pet bed, which is whimsical and elegant and made in Indonesia. It is also $269, plus another $90 for the linen cushion that goes inside it, plus tax, plus shipping. That is a $359 dog bed. It looks wonderful. It is not a chewer’s bed, and if you have a dog who works on furniture when bored, you are buying an expensive snack.
The plaid and faux shearling blanket is the quiet winner of the whole collection. Blankets are the most forgiving category here because they wash, they are cheap to replace, and no dog has ever been injured by a blanket.
The enamel pet food bowl with the mango wood stand at $50 is, unusually, priced better than comparable items from other retailers. It is a nice object. There is one catch, and it is annoying: the bowls are not dishwasher safe. For a water bowl that needs washing every single day, that is a real ongoing cost in effort, and it is the kind of thing that quietly determines whether a bowl actually gets used.
The ones to think twice about
The rope teethers. There is a handful of minimalist rope pieces here that look like they belong in a Nancy Meyers movie, all-white living room, coastal grandmother energy. They are the highest-risk items in the collection. Rope toys shed strands, dogs swallow strands, and strands are what surgeons call a linear foreign body. If you buy them, supervise every session and bin them the moment they start to fray, which is guidance that applies to rope toys from any brand.
The cotton crochet mouse. Same problem, with a design flourish. It looks less like a mouse than a pig crossed with a spider, which is not the issue. The issue is that crochet unravels, and a cat who bats a crocheted toy around for a week is a cat pulling a long cotton thread loose. Cats and string are a specific, well-documented emergency.
The fox toy is genuinely charming and looks like nothing else in a normal toy basket, which is most of its appeal. It is also a plush, and a plush lasts exactly as long as your dog decides it will. The toys run $23 to $26, which is a steep price for an object designed to be dismantled.
The round linen cushion at $30. Here is where the quality wobbles. It is billed as round. What turns up is a shape that has clearly been aiming at a square and missed, the tufting points marking out a lopsided four-sided thing that is neither. Every kitchen has a version of this: the one you make first, before the pan is hot.
The bone-shaped leather poop-bag dispenser, $50. Six inches of leather and a four-inch zipper, made in Spain. That is a lot of money for a thing whose entire function is holding a roll of plastic. It is lovely. It is $50. Plus tax. And shipping.
The bit worth knowing about how it is made
Almost everything in the collection is manufactured in Portugal, India, or mainland China, with two exceptions: the rattan day bed, made in Indonesia, and that leather poop-bag dispenser, made in Spain.
That is more origin transparency than most pet brands offer, and it is worth noting for what it does not tell you. Pet beds and pet toys are not covered by the safety testing regime that governs, say, children’s toys. There is no standard here that guarantees a seam will not open or a rope will not shed. That is true of the entire pet industry, not just Zara, and it means the burden of judging whether an object is safe for your specific animal falls entirely on you.
How to buy from a collection like this
Buy the beds and the blankets, not the toys. Beds are where Zara’s aesthetic advantage is real and the risk is low. Toys are where the aesthetic advantage is real and the risk is a laparotomy.
Check the washing instructions before you check the price. A removable, machine-washable cover is worth more over three years than any amount of linen texture.
Match the object to your actual animal, not the one in the photo. The dog in Zara’s campaign is a whippet lying elegantly still. If your dog is a two-year-old Lab who eats furniture, the rattan bed is not for you and no amount of styling will change that.
Assume the aesthetic is the product. If beige minimalism is your house, this collection will slot in perfectly and you have found your retailer. If it is not, you are paying a design premium for a look you do not want, and there are better-built beds elsewhere for less.
What’s new since this was written
The collection has grown, and it has grown in exactly the direction you would predict. The pet line is now a permanent fixture rather than a novelty drop, with a wider range of beds, including a seagrass version and an enclosed pet house, and Zara keeps adding pieces. They are, of course, still beige.
The more useful update is that pet furniture at this price point now has real competition, and the competitive axis has moved to washability. Several direct-to-consumer bed brands now build around fully removable, machine-washable covers and replaceable inserts as the headline feature rather than an afterthought, which is a quiet acknowledgment that the thing that kills a dog bed is not wear, it is smell.
Zara has not really answered that. It is still selling beautiful objects that mostly want to be spot-cleaned. Whether that is a dealbreaker depends entirely on whether your dog is the kind of dog who arrives home dry.
The bottom line
It is a genuinely nice-looking collection, the beds are the reason to be here, and the price on the food bowl and stand is honestly good.
Just skip the rope and the crochet, wash whatever you buy, and remember that the whippet in the photograph has never once tried to eat the furniture.
Prices listed are those advertised at the time of writing and change frequently. None of the links in this piece are affiliate links.
References
- Zara Home. Pet beds and accessories collection.
- American Veterinary Medical Association. “Foreign body ingestion in pets.”
- Hayes, G. “Gastrointestinal foreign bodies in dogs and cats: a retrospective study of 208 cases.” Journal of Small Animal Practice, vol. 50, no. 11, 2009, pp. 576–583.
- U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. “Toy safety standards” (pet products fall outside this scope).
