The staff at Purrfect Bean had already clocked the problem. They had watched the kitten batting at the bathroom faucet, and owner Michelle Langham has said they were actively working out how to disable it.
They did not get there in time.
In early December 2025, the entire second floor of the Richmond, Virginia cat cafe flooded, and the water came down through the ceiling into the cafe below, doing major damage on the way.
The suspect: a tuxedo kitten, five months old, named Roller. Full name Roll the Dice.
The reconstruction
Piecing together what the staff believe happened, and it is genuinely impressive:
- Roller got into the bathroom.
- Roller, in some fashion, blocked the drain with a towel.
- Roller turned on the faucet.
He knows how to work the tap. He knows how to turn it on and, apparently, off. He loves water, which already puts him in a minority of cats.
Langham has described walking into it and finding something closer to weather than plumbing. A monsoon, indoors, on the second floor.
Most of the cafe’s cats had done what any sensible cat does in a monsoon and evacuated upward, where they sat, dry and visibly furious. Roller was not among them.
Roller was still in the water, splashing, and by his owner’s account enjoying the best afternoon of his short life.
This is not as rare as it sounds
The temptation is to file this under one-in-a-million cat, and it is not.
When the story spread, the replies filled with people who had lived it. One described a pair of foster kittens who flooded her bathroom repeatedly, as a hobby. Another came home on Christmas Eve to a kitchen underwater, and found the family’s black-and-white cat lying contentedly in the overflow from the sink he had opened himself, still the only animal in the house who has ever worked out how.
Cats are extremely good at operating single-lever taps, for reasons that are almost insultingly obvious once you say them out loud. A modern lever faucet is designed to be moved with a single downward or lateral push from a limb, without gripping, and to stay where you put it. That is not a human-specific interface. That is a cat-shaped interface.
And running water is one of the more powerful attractants there is for a cat. Many cats prefer moving water to still water, which is the entire business model of the pet water fountain industry. A cat who has learned that a specific paw movement produces a stream of fresh, moving water has not discovered a trick. They have discovered a lever that dispenses the good stuff, and they will keep using it.
What to do about it, cheaply
If you have a tap-operating cat, you have a genuinely expensive problem waiting to happen, and it is fixable for less than the cost of dinner.
- Swap the handle logic. The offender is almost always a single-lever mixer. Cats have a much harder time with cross-handle taps that require a rotating grip.
- Close the door. Boring, free, effective. The bathroom is not a room your cat needs.
- Fit a lever lock. Child-safety faucet locks exist and cost very little. They work on cats for the same reason they work on toddlers.
- Turn off the isolation valve under the sink for a bathroom you rarely use.
- Never leave a plug or a towel where it can reach the drain. Roller’s flood required two events: the tap and the blockage. Remove the second and a running tap is a water bill, not a ceiling collapse.
- Give them a legal version. Buy the cat a water fountain. A cat who has a circulating, moving water source they are allowed to play with has considerably less reason to go and invent one.
That last one is the actually important piece of advice, and it is the one people skip. Roller is not being naughty. Roller is a water-motivated animal in a building with exactly one water feature, and it is in the bathroom.
The cafe, and what happens to it
Purrfect Bean opened in August 2025 and, as of the flood, was the only cat cafe in Richmond.
Its model is worth explaining, because it is not the one most people assume. The cafe pulls its cats out of foster homes, which is the clever part: every cat living at the cafe is a spare bed freed up in a foster household, and that household can then take another animal out of a shelter. The admission fee customers pay to sit with the cats funds the cats. And the cats are not shift workers. They live there, closed hours included.
Which means a flood is not just a business interruption. It evicts the residents. Purrfect Bean shut for renovations through at least the end of the year, and every cat was sent back to whichever foster household they had come from, over Christmas.
The staff, who do not get paid while the store is shut, are the other casualty. The cafe ran a pop-up fundraiser, lined up more around Richmond, and opened a GoFundMe pointed specifically at the people who had lost their shifts. Then they did the thing that should be studied by every small business in a crisis: they printed a Roller T-shirt, styled as a wanted poster, with the perpetrator’s face on it. The money goes to the parts of the rebuild insurance would not touch, starting with the coffee equipment.
Turning the animal who broke your ceiling into your fundraising mascot is, frankly, the correct response.
And yes, you can adopt him
Every cat at Purrfect Bean is adoptable through Purring Hearts VA.
That includes Roller.
He is a five-month-old tuxedo cat who loves water, has demonstrated an unusual grasp of household plumbing, and has already caused more property damage than most cats manage in a full lifetime. If you are in Virginia, have a rotating-handle faucet, and possess a sense of humor about your ceiling, he is available.
If you are not, or if you are sensible, you can donate to the staff fund instead.
The genuinely serious footnote
Water-loving cats are charming and they are a drowning risk, which is not a sentence people expect in an article like this.
Cats can swim, most of them badly and unwillingly, and a cat who enjoys water is a cat who will get into water containers you have not thought about: a full bath, a bucket, a rain barrel, a pool. The specific hazard is not the swimming. It is the sides. A cat who falls into a container with slick vertical walls and no exit cannot get out, and will keep trying until they cannot.
So if you have a Roller of your own:
- Empty buckets and mop pails, always.
- Cover rain barrels and water butts.
- Do not leave a filled bath unattended with the door open.
- A pool needs a way out, meaning steps or a ramp, and a cat who is allowed near it needs to be taught where they are.
Roller was having a grand time. The next one might not be.
References
- 12 On Your Side (WWBT) reporting on the Purrfect Bean flood, December 2025.
- Purring Hearts VA. https://www.purringheartsva.org/
- Robbins, M., et al. (2019). Effect of water source on water intake and urine concentration in healthy cats. Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, 21(8), 682–690. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1098612X18803753
- International Cat Care. Water and hydration for cats. https://icatcare.org/advice/how-to-encourage-your-cat-to-drink/
- American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Cat-proofing your home. https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/cat-care/cat-proofing-your-home
