The layout, colour scheme, materials and furniture of this house in Beijing have been built to cater to the needs of the owner's disabled dog.

Atelier About Architecture created Dog House for a client whose pet suffers from a congenital joint disease.

The house's basement is largely the dog's space. It has been designed with soft flooring to be gentle on the animal's joints and with ramps and stairs and coated with waterproof, non-slip coating.

There are two dog-only bathrooms on this floor, which were designed after the architects made a long-term study of the owner and the dog's habits.

The centre of the floor, and open to the corridor, is the main dog-bathing room. It has a barrier-free shower accessed via ramps leading to a wetroom area.

From this shower space, steps lead up to a raised medical examination table where the dog can receive care and medication from a person standing at floor level.

A smaller bathroom has a specialist paw-print dog bath tub. It is lined in curtains of noise-reducing fabric from Danish textile brand Kvadrat, to muffle the sound of the animal's excited barking during bath time.

Even the colour and lighting schemes have been chosen with the dog's comfort in mind. Contrary to popular belief, dogs are not colour-blind, but they do perceive less colour than humans as they only have two types of colour receptors in their eyes.

"According to authoritative researches from recent years, dogs can recognise yellow, blue and transitional colour segments in-between in the color spectrum," the architects said in their statement.

"[We] tried to enclose the space by structuring colours in this project, together with the direct and indirect rendering of lights, to guide and effect and mood of spaces."

Atelier About Architecture put together colour combinations for different areas of the three-storey house depending on what, and who, the spaces are used for.

The house's kitchen, dining and living rooms are on the first floor. These shared spaces are decorated in either a more vibrant scheme of rose pink, sky blue and gorse yellow, or a calmer palette of "lake blue", navy and dark grey.

Rooms which the owner uses alone, such as their second floor bedroom, are painted in simple grey hues and white.

"Whenever we see the owner and their beloved dog living and playing together inside the house, we are always touched by the love between them," said the architects.

"Their love is expressed beyond the presentation of architecture and design skills, which is probably the ultimate meaning of the entire project."

Canine companions often get taken into consideration when architects take on a project for dog-loving clients.

Canadian firm Studio North designed a Calgrary house that includes a built-in nook for the family's dog to sleep in, and Tokyo architect Soichi Yamasaki added a doggy play pen to a home in Japan's Hyogo prefecture.

Seoul studio Design Band YOAP designed a dog hotel called the Bow-wow House, for a client who wanted to run a pet-friendly business where her own pack of dogs could be at home.

Photography is by Sun Haiting.