The Pup Hub

The Pup Hub is a doggie daycare and boarding facility set inside a 19th-century Chicago brick retail building in Wicker Park, with homes on the floors above and boutique retail next door. The project is a gut renovation, which sets the real challenge: a masonry shell built in the 1800s now has to perform to standards it was never designed to meet. A working kennel is loud, it gets dirty, it holds odor, and it has to be washed down daily — and none of that can be allowed to reach the residents overhead or the retail adjacent. Four systems decide whether a facility like this works at all: how it contains sound, how it cleans and drains, how it moves air, and how all of it fits an old building. Integro resolved each one of these challenges in preconstruction, before the first wall came down.

That preconstruction work is the project. Working alongside specialist technical experts, Integro set the acoustic, ventilation, and plumbing strategies as building-science problems to be solved on paper before they became construction sets so performance was designed into the building rather than chased on site.

Sound comes first, and the existing brick reverberates sound. Isolation had to be achieved within a 19th-century masonry structure rather than designed into new construction. As a result, Integro engineered the boarding and daycare spaces as sound-isolated assemblies that hold the noise of a working kennel inside the suite, never carrying to the units above or the retail beside it. That same noise is hardest on the people who work in it. Relentless barking is one of the leading reasons animal-care staff burn out and leave, so the design treats sound as a matter of employee mental health, not neighbor relations alone. Sound-absorbing assemblies bring the volume down inside the rooms where employees spend the day, easing the strain that drives turnover in the field. Built into the architecture rather than added on, the acoustic system does both jobs at once while reading as a finished, branded interior.

Cleaning and drainage is system of function and hygiene. The facility is built to be hosed down, which means sanitation is a plumbing problem as much as a surface one: Integro placed floor drains in every room so the entire space can be washed daily and run dry, then specified sealed industrial surfaces and continuous sealants above that drainage so water and waste have nowhere to collect. Those surfaces carry a second demand most buildings never face: a frightened dog will chew, claw, and dig at whatever it can reach, so every finish was chosen to survive that abuse as well as the cleaning — durable enough that an anxious animal cannot chew or claw through it and smooth enough to sanitize when the day is done. Where the old structure could not take that kind of water and wear, the team introduced moisture-tolerant assemblies into the shell, sized for the humidity load a boarding operation puts on a building.

Air does the work nobody sees. Odor is the first thing a customer notices and the fastest way a kennel announces itself to its neighbors. So, HVAC was not just about climate control — it was about nose control. Integro fitted a complex, high-capacity ventilation strategy into the masonry envelope, balancing fresh-air supply against exhaust so odor is carried out of the space instead of drifting to the homes above or the retail next door, and engineered it to hold clean air and steady humidity through a full day of operation without punishing running costs. The result is a kennel that behaves like good infrastructure: quiet to its neighbors, clean to the touch, dry underfoot, and fresh to the nose from the day it opens.

Put together, the systems answer to one test the building cannot fake: health. Keep a kennel quiet, clean, dry, and well-aired, and the dogs and staff will sit and stay.