Plenty of room at dog days inn.

HERE, the guests doze fireside on sheepskin pillows, lulled into slumber by the sounds of trickling fountains. In the summer they wade in luxurious pools beneath the shimmer of Bougainvillea and the shadow of giant banana palms.

Sounds like paradise, right?

It is. But don't get excited. This place is for the dogs--only.

Paradise Ranch in Sun Valley does for man's best friend what five-star resorts do for mankind: spoil them rotten.

Kristyn Goddard and her husband, William Davis, have transformed an otherwise nondescript swath of rural property off of La Tuna Canyon Road into a impeccably manicured resort and day spa for pooches, offering doggy day care, long-term boarding, grooming services, three-week "canine etiquette" courses and even discipline classes for dogs with attitude.

Besides the pampering, Paradise employs a concept that, when first devised by Goddard and Davis in the late 1990s, was relatively unheard of in the kennel industry.

While its approach puts the company on the cutting edge of the kennel business, Paradise is just part of a $15 billion dollar dog and cat boarding industry fueled by animal lovers who spare no expense when it comes to providing top-quality care for their pets.

"Guests," as the dogs are referred to at Paradise, are not locked up in individual kennels. Instead, they roam the one and a half-acre, fenced-in grounds together, take walks together and splash around together in "Labrador Lagoon."

Boarded dogs sleep under covered verandas at a cost of $50 per night. For five more dollars, owners can reserve a room for their pet in one of the main house's Bed and Biscuit suites, or hire a human "bed buddy" (one of Paradise's 25 employees) who will cuddle up with them for the night.

Either way, this is a free-range operation, where dogs socialize with one another as opposed to staring and howling at each other from behind cage bars.

The kennel-free approach is a relatively new concept, one that animal regulators and boarding industry associations have been slow to embrace. Besides Paradise, there is only one licensed, cage-free boarding facility in the San Fernando Valley, Burbank-based Double Dog Dare Ya, launched a few years after Paradise opened its doors in 1997.

"When we first joined the American Boarding and Kennels Association and told them we ran a kennel-free board and care facility, we were shunned," said Goddard. "We were told owners would never allow their dogs to run free with other dogs. They said we were a disaster waiting to happen."

Today, there is a three- to four-week waiting list to get into Paradise. The client list reads like a who's who of the rich and famous: Anthony Hopkins, Peter Krause, Sean Lennon and Shaquille O'Neal are clients. The business has been featured in Time magazine and on TV programs like the "Oprah Winfrey Show," MTV's "Cribs: How to Live Like a Celebrity Pet" and "Animal Planet."

Projected 2003 revenues are around $800,000, a considerable boost from 1998's $60,000, Paradise's first full year in operation. Goddard and Davis are planning two other locations over the next two years to accommodate the growth.

"By our third year here in the Valley, we started having to turn away about 120 dogs a year, said Davis. "We are outgrowing ourselves very quickly."

Not too shabby, considering the couple used the last of their $8,000 savings to get Paradise off the ground after setting up a test operation in San Antonio, where the two lived and ran a school for racehorse jockeys before the local track closed.

"Once they shut the track down, we pretty much saw the writing on the wall," said Davis. "Then a friend asked me to board and train one of his dogs, and it all shifted from there."

A strong word-of-mouth campaign brought more boarders in, but Goddard said she couldn't stand seeing the dogs in kennels. So the grounds were fenced off and the few boarders they had were allowed to roam freely. At night, they slept inside the couple's home.

"We didn't know how that was going to go over at first," said Davis. "But once we got it going, we started getting calls from more and more people who heard about us and liked the idea of knowing their dogs were being cared for in an environment that was similar to home. Within a month, we couldn't take any more dogs in."

With that, the couple, originally from Los Angeles, decided to move the business home and became the first licensed, kennel-free facility in Southern California.

"We thought if we can make this business work in a city like San Antonio, we can certainly make it work back home in Los Angeles," said Goddard.

In fact, today California leads the pack in alternative board and care operations like Paradise, due largely to the emergence and popularity of leash-free dog parks that, according to James Krack, executive director of the Colorado Springs-based American Boarding Kennels Association, first began popping up in San Francisco about a decade ago.

"This is still a new concept in many parts of the country," said Krack, adding that, out of approximately 8,500 licensed dog boarding facilities in the United States, "very, very few are cage-free" operations.

"But over the last 10 years, as more of these dog parks began cropping up, pet owners got used to the cage-free concept," said Krack, "and, though it's still relatively rare in the industry, it is becoming a trend. So, whether traditional board and kennel owners like it or not, pet owners do, and they are forcing them to change."

Krack's association has roughly 2,300 members. It began in 1977 when, he explained, there was little consensus among kennel operators on how to run their businesses.

"When we first organized, the idea was to find a way to connect kennel owners together," said Krack. "Everybody was reinventing the wheel back then, experimenting on everything from immunization to feeding procedures. No one was talking to each other, so everyone did things their own way."

Krack cautioned that, though the kennel-free concept is catching on, not every pooch is cut out for group gatherings.

"I would say kennel-free boarding is probably the direction that the industry is moving toward now, but this isn't for every dog."

Which is why the owner of every potential boarder at Paradise, be it for a day or a month, must pay a $10 evaluation fee and take a tour of the grounds before they can check their pooches in.

If the potential boarder is too aggressive with other dogs and shows scant promise of being capable of calming down, he or she is rejected. All dogs must be up to date on vaccinations, male dogs under a year have to be neutered and, to make sure they get a meal they'll eat, owners must bring in the same food their pets are given at home.

Pat Guilfoyle, owner of Double Dog Dare Ya, followed the Paradise model when he transformed his dog grooming and day-care facility into a cage-free, long-term boarding business three years ago.

He calls Goddard and Davis "pioneers" of the cage-free industry, yet claims to have had the same idea years ago--but not the cash or space to bring it to fruition.

About $1.5 million later, Guilfoyle runs a $600,000-a-year operation. Aside from Double Dog and Paradise, there is only one other licensed cage-free boarding facility for dogs in Southern California: Canyon View in Santa Monica.

"Our business is really kind of a closed community right now," said Guilfoyle. "But I've always felt that traditional boarding facilities were grim. We think cage-free board and care is the wave of the future."