Stone Fireplace, Stone Staircase, Limestone Fireplaces

We make everything in stone:

Stone fireplace surrounds; stone fireplaces; limestone fireplaces; traditional fireplaces; modern fireplaces; tudor fireplaces; contemporary fireplaces; mullion windows; tracery windows; stone staircases; aga shelves; stone door surrounds; stone heads; stone sills; stone plinths; stone quoin blocks; stone hearths; stone shelves; stone fountains; stone pier caps; stone copings. The lot in fact, anything in stone.

Fireplaces are our speciality. Although masons can and do make anything. One of them, who is French, has worked on some of the finest stone buildings in the world. Cathedrals and churches all over the world for example, great stone government buildings; buildings for famous people. You name it, and we’ve probably done it.

Service is very important: Stone carving/working can be very time consuming if the work is intricate, but we always do our best to deliver within the time scale originally agreed. Sometimes of course, events outside our control conspire to delay us. Weather of course if external work is involved. Other trades being held up and those delays travelling down the programme of works.

Stone fireplaces alone rarely cause any delays. They’re inside the building for one thing, so we can ignore the weather, unless it’s another one in a ski resort of course!

Whatever happens we always try to deliver on time, and will go out of our way to cause as little inconvenience to our customers as possible.

You have something you’d like in stone? Give Manorhouse stone a call, and see if they can help you.

I’d never realised how much stone was used in mountain houses: I’m sure it depends on region (obviously) but on a recent trip to the alps, I stayed in a stunning small town called Les Contamines-Montjoie. It’s about an hour East of Geneva, is located up a stunningly beautiful dead-end valley. The snow record is brilliant because of the weather trap that the valley causes, and the town is completely unspoilt, very friendly, and not a rip-off. Of course if you fancy a day somewhere more expensive then chamonix is 30 mins away, as is Megeve. The latter being reachable by ski if you take the lift from the neighbouring town of St. Gervais les bains.

I had been to this resort once before, for a short skiing break, and not only was the skiing outstanding, but the only people i ever seemed to queue behind were the people I was staying with! It’s a real gem. However, this recent trip was in the summer, and what a revelation it was. I’d never been to the alps in the summer before, and whether it’s mountain biking; walking; swimming; playing tennis…. there is just so much to do.

On one gentle walk back to our chalet. ( www.chaletkiana.com ) we found ourselves talking to the town mayor. What a wonderful chap: a farmer and mountain dweller all his life, and he showed us his house and farm as we walked through the town. Now I’d always thought chalets were exclusively built in wood, obviously because of the ready supply of timber. But in this region the practice on the larger houses was to put a stone surround round the front door and several of the front windows.

The mayor’s house had these features in prominence, and the stone used was a beautiful open textured stone of a yellow to buff brown colour. This massive farmhouse, built in 1701 also had a stone fireplace clearly made at the same time and by the same mason, as the moulding and mode of stone work was clearly the same.

Stone fireplaces in the mountains. What a surprise.

If you’ve ever been to Petra in Jordan, ( which I haven’t ) and seen the incredible carvings in the stone cliffs there, then you’ll know what an incredible art stone masonry is. How someone can turn a solid block of stone into the most amazing artefacts. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a statue in Petra, a Phoenix at the Pyramids or a just a simple stone fireplace, the artistry and skills are basically the same.

Of course the artisans who carved Petra or who built the pyramids and the statues there, had few sophisticated tools than the modern mason. He can use electric grinders and cutters to remove much of the stone before doing all the fine finishing work by hand. Massive saws can cut the blocks into manageable sizes so that it can be handled more easily. The ancient mason had no such sophistication. He had vast amounts of labour so the blocks could be sawn up, but  the tools with which he did the final intricate work, were basic and crude.

I have no doubt that those ancient masons would consider making a ‘modern’ stone fireplace to be a simple task when compared to the giant feats of skill that they achieved all those 1000s of years ago.

Installing a new stonee fireplace often involves opening up an old chimney that was blocked up years ago. In the 50s 60s and 70s many were blocked up and a luvly modern gas fire was put in a hole in the wall where the fireplace used to be. More efficient it may have been but more attractive definately not! When these things were  blocked up, builders being a resourceful bunch, would often discard items/rubbish in the hole before they bricked it up.

It’s amazing just what you find! Very often a newspaper or piece of newspaper. This will almost definately give you the date that your tasteful modern fire was installed! I always find it fascinating if there are any adverts with prices. Just brings home to you how much prices have rocketed over the last few decades, although there are often surprises, like the relative cost of electrical goods/tv’s etc. which are relatively cheap these days.

We’ve found old trowels and other tools, some broken and obviously discarded, and others perfect and apparently left behind the brickwork by accident: I wonder how long the original owner spend searching for them, or blaming his mates/children for taking them!?

Sometimes a coin, or a bit of scribble on the wall, or quite often a date and initials scratched in the mortar, no doubt by the builder. It can all be fascinating stuff, and fitting stone fireplaces has given us more than a few unexpected surprises!

You often hear stories of people opening up an old barn, on a property where an old farmer or similar has died, and inside the barn is found some amazing old car. A dusty old Rolls Royce, one of only 10 ever made or something like that, and then it’s sent for auction and fetches about £3million, and you wonder if the poor deceased person knew what a fortune they were sitting on?

Well of course it’s not just old cars and the like. People did store all sorts of old things in barns and garden sheds when they weren’t needed, and over the years they got forgotten, while in some cases they appreciated massively in value. (that would be the minority of things of course, before you go and rip the doors off your grandfathers’ old sheds!)

But in our case, stone fireplaces are what we would like to find. So many were torn out in the 60s and 70s to be replaced with nicer ‘modern’ ones. The majority of course probably went straight in the skip, but hopefully some wonderful old stone fireplace is lieing in a dark corner, covered in dust and pigeon droppings but just waiting to be discovered.

If you happen to be the lucky person that discovers such a thing, then please give us a call, as we’d love to come and see it, and perhaps we could even find a buyer for you?

You may not just find a car and a fireplace. Practically anything that was discarded years ago, is probably someones ‘collectors’ item’  Just search on Google for the item you find, and you can be sure someone will want it. A good test is to do a search on Ebay too, and if you find something similar to the item you’ve found then it may give you a clue to its value.

Some houses have original stone fireplaces, some have had the originals pulled out and replaced with ‘modern’ replacements (very prevalent in the 70s) Some have originals still in place, but too damaged or poor design to be retained. In short there are 100s of reasons why you may need a new fireplace in your property. Limestone fireplaces are a wonderful addition to any home. The beauty of the natural material, combined with the appeal of a truly craftsman made feature.

Installation of such an item need not be difficult. In building terms a fireplace is not a complicated thing to install. In most cases there will be an existing chimney breast. Sometimes this breast will be on the outside of the house, but in most cases it will be internal. The task is simple: Your builder needs to make the opening size of the recess, match the opening size of the fireplace you have chosen. Barring any major unforeen problems, it should not be more than a day’s job, and should cost very little. If the existing bricks that line the recess for the stone fireplace are in good condition, then you need not even buy many materials.

Once the recess is prepared the fireplace itself can be fitted. Because the stone is very heavy, great care has to be taken during installation to ensure that the stone is not chipped, and there is no substitute for having plenty of (strong) helpers around at this stage. But if all goes well, your beautiful stone fireplaces can be completed within 2 days.

There was a time when stone products, whether it be windows door surrounds or stone fireplaces, were too expensive for modern buildings. But as property values in the uk have soared over the last 25 years, so the inclusion of such quality features has become far more cost effective. There was also a time when stone windows (mullions) were vastly more expensive than timber ones, but that gap has now narrowed greatly and in fact the cost of a stone triple opening window with steel casements it quite reasonable when compared with a hardwood joiner made bespoke timber window.

There is no doubt which type adds more character to a period property. Stone ages and weathers beautifully, and in only a few years can look like it has always been there. It also never needs painting.

Internal features such as fireplaces obviously don’t weather in the same way, and although they will take on the bumps and stains that home life throws at them, they sometimes need a bit of help to be aged a bit sooner. Our customers have told us of many methods to achieve this: a bit of light woodstain on a cloth, rubbed into the corners of the stone looks very good, though you should experiment on out of sight areas first. Doing the same with an old damp teabag, can also give a nice patina to the mouldings on a stone fireplace.

Some more confident people have actually bashed a few corners off the stone to simulate hundreds of years of hard life, but we would never recommend attacking one of our stone fireplaces like that!!

……so, having visited countless country houses and historical properties, we had a pretty good idea of what elements should be included in the design for our fireplace. Primarily it was going to be plain and simple. No fancy carving or intricate mouldings, just a solid, functional, yet beautiful design. It was also going to be substantial! This was a substantially built farmhouse: Built with good materials and designed to last for hundreds of years. Our fireplace needed to fulfill the same criteria. We therefore made the fireplace out of solid blocks of stone that are 160 mm (5 1/4″) thick. These are very heavy, but if you decide to build one of our fireplaces into your chimney breast, then this thickness and strength means the top can act as a lintol to support some of your chimney breast if necessary.

Many modern fireplaces of course are made of slips that are ’stuck on’ to look like heavy blocks, or some are made from less substantial blocks of stone, but really there is no substitute for proper full sized blocks. That is the way the ancient originals were made, and is also the way we believe modern equivalents should be made.

This means a VERY heavy stone fireplace. (Around 400kg) for a ‘Large original’  But despite this meaning you’ll need a bit of muscle for the installation, it’s all worth it when you see the finished product.

So, back to that old farmhouse: We drew up our design and within 3 weeks we had turned it into the real thing. It was installed in the beautiful house and is of course still there now. It’s probably 30 years old now, but looks like it has been there for many hundreds.

So now we’d got back to where the original stone fireplace used to be: Some pieces of limestone where evident fixed to the brickwork on the sides of the chimney breast and on one side, in the hearth there was a thin square of what could only be the bottom of the leg of a stone fire surround. We asked our farmer pal, but he had no recollection of any stone fireplace having been there, and the appearance of the remaining pieces suggested it had been removed, for whatever reason, many years before he was born.

We had sizes though, as it was clear where the fireplace had stood and the height of the lintol. We now had to find a replacement. It was a long a very hard search: We must have visited every reclamation yard in the country, but nowhere could we find what we wanted. Sadly this was before the days of the internet, the advent of which has made such searches so much easier. We had to do miles of travel and trudging round muddy yards, made all the worse, because despite our efforts we found nothing!

The companies making ‘new’ fireplaces did not cater for this market. They just produced poor imitation items, that were not of the quality or size that this wonderful house deserved, so after much deliberation, we decided to make our own. This involved many more miles of exploration, as we visited 100s of great houses to get an idea of what elements we needed to include in fireplace for a house of this period.

Certainly it needed to be large (around 6 feet wide and 4′ 6″ high) it also needed to be substantial. No thin, ’stick on’ slips of stone for this house, it needed to be deep (and very heavy!) stone blocks as they were when they were originally made. We knew it would make production expensive and difficult, but we did not want to compromise.

So on we went with the renovation: The external works were done first, as we were doing the job in the Autumn, and we needed to get the place properly weather proof before winter set in. The mullions were in pretty good condition, but the small workers cottage annex attached to the side was in worse condition. We suspected this had been the original farmhouse before the grander one was built, but even this had employed stone for many of its features including stone mullion windows

After great efforts, the exterior was made secure before the bad weather set in, and we embarked on the massive amount of interior work. Much as it is a cliche, the interior was really a time capsule. Certainly the retiring farmer had not done any works to the inside and he had lived there for 50 years. I suspect his father before him had done little more. This of course is a good thing when one comes to renovation, as hopefully a lot of original features remain.

In this case they did; beautiful fine timber architraves round all the doors; lovely tall moulded skirtings, and in the main reception rooms some fine dentil moulded plaster cornice. The one horror though, was the wall where a fireplace used to be. On the wide chimney breast, there was a green tiled 1950s gas fire. It’s hard to describe how horrendous this looked but I suppose it gave some efficient heat in the days before central heating.

We pulled out this monstrosity, and behind it was the still intact fire recess, actually in perfect condition. On the floor where some quarry tiles and attached to the wall were some slivers of limestone……. evidence of a stone fireplace?