Add to Del.icio.us
Digg this Article
Add to Mixx
Nothing is more emblematic of winter than a crackling fire – the rich smells of smoke and wood, the sweet heat. Each year, we do the fireplace one better by asking talented design professionals for unique, tasteful ideas for dressing up the mantel. Take a look.
‘Found Articles’
Peggy and Jon Duvall, owners of Jon C. Duvall Design and Construction Management, take the green approach whenever possible. That extends to holiday decor. Peggy looks for decorating materials in friends’ gardens or on the bucolic property she and her husband share in White Post, VA. “We’re into found articles for the holidays,” Peggy says. The shallow, slate-tiled fireplace is inherently green – the roaring fire almost instantly warms the open kitchen and living room. The oak beams are reclaimed storm damaged wood, and the stone surrounding the fireplace is from an old barn foundation that was torn down.
A heavier hand would have undermined the natural beauty, so the Duvalls kept it simple: three lush magnolia clusters and natural moss balls strung up with grapevine over the mantel, and a bowl full of berries, blooms, and more moss balls, circled with a gnarled length of grapevine and placed on their handcrafted walnut dining table.
“I have all this grapevine… maybe I’ll make a wreath this year,” Peggy says with a smile.
Gestures in Green
For the Carrara marble dining room fireplace at Elway Hall, “I was thinking to keep it in the family of greens,” says Designer Barry Dixon of Barry Dixon Inc. Juniper, balsam, limes, cedar, and celery-colored satin play together beautifully. He suggests that decorating with the truest, plainest reds and greens is a mistake – choose instead an orangey red or gold-tinged green, and flesh out the palette with a few closely related hues.
On the mantel, along with swaths of greenery, Dixon filled decanters with pale green water. It’s an inexpensive, elegant trick. Bring drama at night by placing votives behind the water – they’ll make “starlight refractions on the ceiling,” he says. To ensure your hearthside gathering goes smoothly, he offers some strategic, teasing advice: “Put the cold-natured guests by the fire.”
Forget Holly and Ivy
The look of lush foliage isn’t for everyone. This ventless EcoSmart fireplace designed by Architects Lael Taylor and John Dennis Murphey of Meditch Murphey Architects has an exceptionally long, 9-inch wide mantel. It seemed to merit something a bit more whimsical. The interior is full of neutral tones and peppered with lively works of art (Daybreak above the fireplace by Laurel Lukaszewski, for example), so Taylor and Murphey borrowed some inspiration from the palette in the Craig Alan painting, Port Riddle, nearby.
“It’s a low, long mantel,” Murphey says, “in a room like this, that horizontal defines the space.” An heirloom train set (the cars were collected by several generations in the same family) travels the length of the mantel, emphasizing the horizontal plane and adding some essential color. The strongest vertical elements are the oversized stockings from Christmas Krinkles by Patience Brewster, and the snowflakes and lollipops came from Christmas Central.
Softened Stone
For a gorgeous outdoor Rumford fireplace (a style characterized by a shallow firebox and narrow, streamlined throat, and known for giving off abundant heat), the only option for Rob Wilkinson, a landscape designer at Merrifield Garden Center, was to festoon the gray stone with deodar cedar, twinkling white lights, and handfuls of hanging rosehips and acorns. An ornamented weeping blue atlas cedar enters the picture, too.
The decorations are meant to be askew, giving the tableau an organic, overgrown look and “softening the strong, rigid vertical lines,” Wilkinson says. He describes the fireplace’s design as Swedish modern, so light wicker furniture completes the look, offering comfy seating for whiling away a mild winter night.
