Go Niche

This time last year we got dwarf hamsters. Two cute little fellas the kids fell in love with instantly. And they were fellas, we were assured by the pet shop.

Six weeks later we had 35. Every few days we’d unearth a new batch under the sawdust, looking for all the world like raw cocktail sausages.

The babies were having babies. Our older kids spent their time ew-ing at the incestuous implications while the youngest was traumatised by internet research that warned him to get all babies away from their father before he ATE THEM.

In the end they all went back to the pet shop and I haven’t thought of hamsters since, until that is I came across La Villa Hamster, in the western French City of Nantes.

The French gite, which opened three years ago, is designed to allow guests experience life as a hamster, a less fecund one presumably. The aim, according to the interior designer responsible for it, was to turn the entire space into a hamster cage.

I haven’t been and I don’t speak French but I did see a strange man in square spectacles don a furry hamster hat and work the apartment’s human sized hamster wheel on You Tube. So it must be true.

He then showed us a bed with bags of sawdust for headboards, walls made of woodchip-filled plastic and drinking water you had to step on a pedal to release.

If it’s the kind of holiday accommodation you’d go nuts for, the house of hamster is all yours for €109 a night. I think it’s probably too soon for us.