Look at a Lay Lo bed and you read design first. The speckled terrazzo covers, the ones that earned nods from Architectural Digest and Refinery29, land somewhere between a mid-century floor and a scoop of confetti ice cream. What you do not see in the product photo is the thing that actually started the company: a woman who could not find a bed good enough for a dog she was about to lose.
That is the real story of Lay Lo, and it is worth telling in that order, because the design is the easy part to fall for and the harder truth underneath is what makes the brand worth your money.
It began with a 13-year-old Lab and an empty apartment floor
Gabriela Baiter was in her first Los Angeles apartment with her first dog, Gable, a 13-year-old black Labrador, when she went looking for a bed that fit both her space and her sense of style and came up empty. So she bought fabric and sewed one herself. On a whim she listed it on Etsy to see what would happen, and the made-to-order orders started coming. She never set out to run a pet company. It became one anyway.
Her partner, a product designer, is the reason it stopped being a hobby. He saw that the one-off beds could be built into proper collections, and he began pulling in outside designers to create originals. That instinct, collection over one-off, is still how Lay Lo works today.
The name arrived the way good names sometimes do, fully formed in the middle of the night. Baiter woke up, wrote it down, and went back to sleep. It works on two levels at once: the old advice to let a sleeping dog lie, and the literal fact that a dog bed sits low to the floor. Lay low. Let them rest.
Why terrazzo, and why it refuses to go out of style
The Terrazzo Collection is a love letter to Palm Springs, where Baiter and her business partner Drew Downie now live. They kept traveling there from LA, fell for the desert’s mid-century architecture, and got hooked on one material in particular: terrazzo, the speckled composite that has been around for roughly five centuries since Venetian workers first pressed leftover marble chips into flooring. The house they moved into in 2020 has terrazzo floors. The collection, in other words, is their actual home turned into a dog bed.
Terrazzo endures because it is a chameleon. It started as flooring, migrated to countertops and furniture, and now shows up under sleeping dogs, and it reads completely differently depending on what surrounds it. That adaptability is exactly why a pattern from the 1500s still looks current in a 2026 living room.
The design has a conscience built in
Two things separate a Lay Lo bed from a pretty cushion. The first is that it is built to last and to be cleaned. Each bed uses an orthopedic mattress you can swap out for any filling you like, wrapped in a breathable, duvet-style cover that washes and replaces. Pets are synonymous with mess; a cover you can strip and launder means you are not throwing out an entire bed over one accident. For an older dog, the orthopedic layer is not a marketing word. Aging joints spend more hours lying down and carry more pressure on hips and elbows while they do it, so a supportive base earns its keep in a way it never quite does for a bouncy two-year-old.
The second is waste. The ReMade Collection, made with Los Angeles designer Warren Aldrich of the clothing line W.A.L.D., turns deadstock fabric left over from past runs into new covers, using the patchwork weaving techniques Aldrich is known for. Baiter is candid that a small run of upcycled beds does not save the planet, but it builds the habit of designing waste out. The brand has also collaborated with French fashion designer Joseph Altuzarra, and it is moving toward knit-to-shape construction, which trims scrap to near zero, plus recycled threads and a product spun from recycled plastic.
The part Baiter cares about most: old dogs
Ask her about her own pets and the design talk falls away. She is, in her words, an adopter of old dogs. Gable, the 13-year-old Lab who started all of this, and Cody, her 10-year-old Poodle mix, both passed within a short window of each other. The double loss is what pushed her toward a younger third dog, Stella, a mellow two-year-old Golden Retriever and Papillon mix who cannot be pried off her Lay Lo bed. But the pull toward seniors never left, and she has said an old soul may join the household again to show Stella the ropes.
That is not just a personal footnote. Lay Lo has donated a share of sales to the Grey Muzzle Organization, a nonprofit that funds senior-dog programs at shelters and rescues nationwide, from hospice foster care to medical screenings. Senior dogs are among the hardest animals to move out of shelters, passed over for puppies despite being calmer, often already trained, and desperate for a soft place to land. A company that started because one woman wanted her old Lab to be comfortable, and that gives back to the dogs least likely to get adopted, has its priorities in the right order.
So yes, buy the bed because it looks good. Just know that the speckles are the surface. Underneath is a brand that understands the whole point of a dog bed is a good, safe rest, and that the dogs who need one most are usually the gray-faced ones nobody else is looking at.
