Landlords having mostly failed to get the memo about dogs being man’s best friend, a Danish developer is building an apartment block exclusively for dog owners.

The three-story complex in Frederikssund, Zealand, about 45km from Copenhagen, should be finished within the next 12 months and its 18 rented flats will be reserved for tenants with dogs, the local Frederiksborg Amts Avis newspaper reported.

“There’s a real demand,” developer Niels Martin Viuff told the Ritzau news agency. “People are tired of the fact that there are so many places where you cannot have a dog. We’d like to welcome dog owners. Many of them feel a little lonely.”

Viuff, who consulted the Danish kennel club on the apartments’ design and canine-friendly features, said he and his partner Palle Søegaard hoped the Doghouse, as it will be known, would also foster a strong community spirit among residents because they will share a common passion.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Lise Lotte Christensen, a behavioural consultant at the club, the country’s largest association for dog owners, told the paper. “It’s super exciting, it's innovative, and we look forward to following the project as it evolves.”

Christensen said the flats would feature hard-wearing, easy-to-clean floors. “Dogs wear things out. They have their winter outdoor footwear on all year round,” she said. “They don’t take their shoes off in the entrance.”

The complex will also have a communal dog-washing facility in the gardens, which would be designed to take account of the fact that dogs are not great respecters of plants, she added.

Viuff said he would want to meet prospective tenants and their dogs before signing the lease. Residents with more than one dog would be welcome as long as the dogs were small, but the very biggest breeds, weighing more than 45kg, would be refused because the apartments were not big enough.

Cat owners, too, would be discouraged, for obvious reasons. But if the Doghouse proved successful, a Cathouse might follow. “I could imagine we might build an apartment block for cat owners,” Viuff said. “It’s on the drawing board.”