A friendly fiberglass feline icon is being used as a catalyst for change in one London neighborhood, thanks to the incredible creativity and vision of one local firm. 

Tsuruta Architects, recent winner of the RIBA London Small Project Award for the stunning Wooden Roof project, is behind the new cat-inspired design of five apartments in London’s Catford district, which has for many years suffered from a bad reputation as an area that’s prone to violence and frequent robberies. 

Tsuruta is seeking to change the narrative with a fictional backstory that connects the apartments to the neighborhood’s local cinematic history as imagined by architect Taro Tsuruta and writer Chris Robert. 

Taking as his charge as a highly visible sculpture of a cat that looms over the southeast London neighborhood, Tsuruta’s apartments feature over 27,000 laser-etched cat faces that adorn everything in the new and existing retail-adjacent buildings from facade to fixtures and help mitigate the negative stigma imposed on the neighborhood, according to the architect.

“It’s something for people to say about Catford again, rather than just the giant cat, and being a dodgy place,” Taro Tsuruta told FastCompany. “We wanted to have something that somebody can use to start a conversation. If somebody can say there used to be a film studio here, then I’m very happy.”

Each apartment has unique amenities and comes complete with fabricated plywood furniture and other features like a roof terrace, mezzanines, space-saving staircases, and PAC-MAN-esque metalwork balcony that also sports the cat-faced theme.

The project was completed earlier in the summer and will soon be joined by a park revamp that will, Tsuruta hopes, invigorate Catford ahead of Lewisham’s rotation as London’s 2022 Borough of Culture.

More details can be seen in the video below.