Touring my kennel, people have commented on its simplicity. An endless hall with doors on either side. At face value, you'd think it was just another piece of the architecture; something to be forgotten as you get about your day. But that's not the case.
Most kennels are designed to impress the person holding the leash, not the dog at the end of it.
When a prospective client tours your facility, they're making a decision based on what they see. Clean floors, solid doors, and a layout that looks organized and intentional. Those things matter, but a kennel that passes the tour test and fails the operational test is a facility that makes your staff's job harder. And in this industry, harder usually means less safe.
The hallway is where that tension shows up most clearly.
Most Facilities Skip It Entirely
Walk through enough kennels, and you start to see the same two patterns. The first is a row of runs or crates connected by a pathway — movement infrastructure as an afterthought. Dogs go from point A to point B because there's no other option, not because the space was designed to move them safely. The second is a play area in the centre of the building with kennels arranged around the outside. It feels open and active and photographs, but it means that every time you need to move a dog, you're routing it through whatever else is happening in that central space.
Both of these are cost decisions made once at the design stage. The problem is that the cost is never-ending, as you pay for them every day for the life of the building.
The hallway — a dedicated, separated movement corridor — solves three problems simultaneously: noise, traffic, and safety. Skip it, and you own all three.
The Traffic Flow Problem
Picture this: it's midday, and large dogs are playing in the yard, when a small dog needs to be moved, perhaps due to an early checkout, a medical situation, or a booking change. In a facility where kennels ring the outside of a central play area, that movement goes through the yard.
Now add a dog with a strong prey drive to the large group. It doesn't matter that the small dog is on a leash or that your staff member is experienced. The design of that building just created a situation that needn't exist.
Dog attacks are a real concern in any facility that wasn't designed to have clear corridors or effective communication to mitigate risks. Incidents can occur when a door opens at the wrong time, there's a timing error during a busy shift, or your focus wavers from a momentary distraction.
At The Barkway, we have two buildings, each with a central hallway and exits at either end. Moving dogs between buildings required solving a problem of its own, so we built a secondary fenced corridor between the two structures to create a controlled path. It added cost and time. But it meant dogs never had to move through an active group to reach their destination. That separation is the whole point.
What Moves Through the Gaps
The hallway isn't just about where dogs walk. It's about what they're exposed to while walking.
Recently, a dog in one of our suites tipped its food bowl. The food spilled into the hallway through the gap at the base of the door. We learned fast that a dog passing the door was food-aggressive. The only reason it didn't escalate is that we run a privacy protocol in that section of the building, so there was one dog in the hallway rather than three. You need to clear the doorways so water and food aren't exposed to other dogs. The same risk exists with chain link runs, open grating, or any non-solid barrier.
That said, those options can create another risk; dogs fence-fighting on the other side of a barrier. Often arising from the frustration of being unable to complete a normal greeting sequence, fence fighting can escalate quickly. Operators who don't know this blame the dog rather than the design, and then spend years managing a problem built into the building.
The Information on the Door Matters as Much as the Door
Physical design controls the exposure. Operational protocol controls the human decision at the moment of contact. Both have to work.
Our suites have windows in the doors, which means we use grease markers. Every door has information the staff needs before they open it: the dog's name, privacy status (if required), medication schedule (if applicable), and any compatibility flags — not good with small dogs, requires a long leash, whatever is relevant to that animal. The goal is everything a staff member needs, readable in the two seconds it takes to reach for the handle.
It's a simple system. It works because the window is there and the discipline is there to keep it current. Operators without windowed doors need a similar solution, such as a tag, a card, or a colour system. The door is only as safe as the information attached to it.
What Good Actually Looks Like
This article isn't an argument that every facility needs solid doors. It's an honest account of the problems that arise when you're seriously considering hallway design, based on what we've learned running The Barkway.
Solid doors reduce barrier aggression. They're not the only valid choice, but you have to understand what costs you're balancing. If I were building from scratch today, I'd explore an exterior, gated corridor along the building's exterior, which would give the dogs a direct path to the play yard. Staff movement would become cleaner, traffic flow during peak rotation would become manageable, and that corridor would double as an emergency egress path.
In Ontario, that means designing for ice, snow loading, and winter footing conditions. Real cost, real complexity. Worth knowing before the plans are drawn.
We have solid doors at The Barkway, and I'm glad we do. We're upgrading them to metal as budget allows, because dogs are hard on wood, and the improvement is worth making incrementally. But short of a significant capital injection, we're working with the bones we have — and managing what those bones can't solve through protocol, staff training, and knowing our dogs.
The Skill Is Knowing Which Problems Are Worth Solving
No facility is perfect. Every building has trade-offs, and not every trade-off is worth the cost of fixing. Prey drive isn't something you can easily train away, nor is barrier reactivity. Both are directly affected by hallway design — sight lines trigger prey drive, noise transmission amplifies reactivity, and a layout that forces dogs through shared space creates encounters that have to be managed.
Good design reduces what your team has to carry. The hallway is one of the cheapest problems to solve at the design stage, and one of the most expensive to ignore once the building is up.
Dogs don't care what the hallway looks like. Build it for them anyway.
