Michelle Aoki owns four dogs. But deep down, she’s really a cat person. Cats are her true love. There’s just one problem — her husband is allergic.

But on a recent Saturday, Aoki was all smiles as she took a seat at a cafe table in a large, light-filled storefront dotted with plush couches, scratching posts and 15 resident felines.

“This is how we get our cat fix,” she said as she cuddled a 13-week-old tabby with white socks. “Love them, but can’t have them.”

Hawaii’s first and only cat cafe celebrated its grand opening earlier this month and in the three weeks since, business has been brisk. Although kitty salons are common in Japan and China, the trend is finally hitting the U.S., with dozens of cat cafes popping up across the mainland in the last five years.

While Honolulu has the occasional pop-up cat parlor, the Hawai‘i Cat Cafe is the first brick-and-mortar venture to combine cats, coffee and pastries. All of the cats are adoptable through a partnership with the Oahu Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Cafe founder Cindy Washburn, 27, hatched the idea out of a desire to own a business with a social purpose.

“I’ve always wanted to have my own business, but everything else that I thought of didn’t have the passion behind it,” Washburn said. “This was something where, I love cats, I love coffee, and at the end of the day I will feel good about myself and what I did.”

The Oahu SPCA was enthusiastic from the get-go, seeing the cafe as a new venue to give adoptable cats exposure as well as free up space in its Wahiawa no-kill shelter. The agency helped build buzz and get the word out on social media when the cafe had its soft opening in mid-September.

“We started sending cats down and the adoption rate has been astounding,” said Rachel Zinkus, Oahu SPCA’s adoption coordinator. “It’s been really great to get (the cats) out of the shelter and get them more opportunities. It’s such a nice setup, we’re so happy to be part of the partnership.”

After just six weeks, Washburn is up to 20 adoptions. One more family is fostering a cat with adoption being the likely outcome, and two new applications were submitted in the last few days. By contrast, the Wahiawa shelter had just six adoptions all of last month.

The comfortable “catmosphere” Washburn created surely has something to do with it, too.

The cat lounge occupies a sunny corner storefront on Kapahulu Avenue with long walls of glass windows on two sides. The 750-square-foot space has the feel of a generous living room with a handful of tables, padded window seats, plushy ottomans and a couch. Cat trees are tucked into every corner and cat tunnels and toys scattered throughout for more playful moments. The cats’ privies area is discreetly hidden in a walled-off corner with only a cat door in the wall to give it away.

THE CAFE serves Honolulu Coffee Co. brews and playfully offers signature drinks like Calico and Siamese Lattes. Kitty-shaped cookies are from Hokulani Bakery and thick croissants and scones from Honolulu Coffee, all served with paw-shaped tongs.

The coffee bar portion is separated from the cat room by two doors — a necessary redundancy to prevent escapes — and a giant 9-by-4-foot picture window fronting a small counter and stools that allows patrons to watch the cats without getting their paws dirty.

Washburn borrowed the glass-window idea from cat cafes on the mainland to provide a distinct area for the coffee apparatus. The division is intentional for public health reasons as well.

Still, it’s a clever design that gives even people with cat allergies a chance to be part of the experience.

After seeing a friend post on Instagram about the cafe, Aoki, 32, of Mililani, made an appointment for her and her two children to play with the kitties for an hour. Her husband watched through the glass as their 9-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son tried to engage another friendly feline with a toy on a string. “This guy reminds me of my old cat, a little bit,” Aoki said.

She appreciated the window allowing her husband to watch, “otherwise he’d have to stay out there for a whole hour alone.”

A MEMBER of Washburn’s staff is always in the lounge, to keep an eye on things and relay information on each of the cats.

Diamond, a talkative 9-year-old with black-and-white fur, is pretty chill and just likes to hang out. Her legs are a little short for her size, so she looks a bit funny when she runs — like a dachshund version of a cat.

Becca, a 10-week-old calico, is extremely talkative and loves to snuggle. She even meows in her sleep.

Your best chance for a sofa companion might be Baby Ruth, a mellow 3-year-old couch potato who is mostly white with black splotches. He likes to lie in weird positions and doesn’t care much about what others are up to, especially those young kittens scampering across the floor.

Shannon Paulino, 45, of Moiliili, sat with Baby Ruth for almost an hour. He thought the cat cafe was a great way to facilitate adoptions.

“This is the best way, really. You don’t get to know their personality otherwise,” he said. Paulino and his family recently lost their 18-year-old cat and aren’t ready to adopt yet — maybe in a few months. They plan to come back to the cat cafe at that time.

By then, Washburn hopes to have added cat shelves and wall cubbies so the kitties can run amok. She offers cat yoga on Sundays and hopes to expand her fee schedule to include memberships.

All in good time, she says. Wearing multiple hats as chief cat minder, store manager, social media manager and occasional barista has been an education. She studied entrepreneurship at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, but running a business in real life “is way, way more involved and there are always surprises coming.”

But those surprises can be pleasant.

Older cats — often overlooked in a shelter environment — are finding new homes through the cat cafe. Egypt, a 6-year-old gray tabby with green eyes, had been at the shelter for three years. Within two weeks of moving to the cafe, she was scooped up by a woman whose cat had recently died.

Perhaps there’s truth to the old adage, “cats always land on their feet.”