ARCHITECTURAL MOODBOARD
These stylish fireplace ideas will ensure your hearth becomes the centrepiece of your living space
The type of fireplace design you’re able to adopt depends on what you’re working with. If you’re building a new home, the world may be your oyster as you can really design and plan in where a fireplace will go and how it works with the space you’re creating — subtle stove or standout showpiece?
If you do have an existing fireplace in your home, there’s no guarantee that previous owners will have retained the original fireplace. However, finding a replacement fireplace shouldn’t be too much of an issue. There’s a plethora of modern fireplaces available to choose from, while you’ll be able to pick up original fireplaces from places like salvage yards or even from social media marketplaces, where people are renovating period houses.
CONSIDER PROPORTIONS
If you’re designing from scratch or updating an existing fireplace, it’s important to ensure that the chimney breast, surround and mantel (if you’re having one) are in proportion with the room.
This is especially true of modern fireplaces, where styles and trends might adapt and change how you feel about a certain shape — just think about the garish brick and stone-clad beasts of the 1960s and 1970s.
With its twist on a traditional inglenook fireplace, this contemporary example blends seamlessly into the room, forming part of the back wall.
ADD DOUBLE HEIGHT FOR DRAMA
A common feature in barn conversions, vaulted ceilings are quickly becoming a firm favourite in modern homes and extensions, too. Allow the grandeur of airy spaces to shine by combining a show-stopping chimney breast as part of your fireplace design for something truly unique.
As well as emphasising the vast height of this vaulted space, this selfbuild ingeniously utilises the double-height chimney breast to disguise the flue of the inset stove, and provide alcoves and a raised hearth for storage. Most importantly, the kitchen and dining areas are located behind the chimney breast and away from the sitting area.
MIX AND MATCH STYLES
There’s no rule in any interior design book that means styles have to be rigidly adhered to, so shake things up a bit by combining ideas that inspire you. It is, after all, your home.
In this example, a tiled hearth and back plate are given centre stage as the surround is painted the same colour as the walls to create an individual and timeless fireplace. The choice of paint for the surround is an interesting tactic, as it sends this dominant figure into the background, but its form is retained and frames the inset stove.
Using ceramic tiles is an opportunity to create colour and bring a variety of materials into
