Stone Fireplace, Stone Staircase, Limestone Fireplaces

Our work is HEAVY work. Nothing made in stone is ever lightweight, and whether it’s the steps for a new stone staircase, or the jamb blocks of a new stone fireplace, all sections of our products are weighty. We do our cutting when the stone is wet (we hose it down) and although this makes the stone easier to work; dampens the dust, and cools the cutting tools, it also makes the stone even heavier!

In many installations there is no room for lifting equipment, so all the lifting has to be done with human muscle. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to manoevre a big stone fireplace head section into a tiny lift to get it up to some top floor apartment. (usually in London where such things are necessary) And while we’re pulling muscles and struggling to get the stone fireplaces into their intended location, some vindictive traffic warden is writing us a ticket! Tough job this you know!

Anyway, all that weight is what gives our stone fireplaces; stone stairs, and all our other stone products, an air of solidity and longevity: these aren’t some cheap imitation decor that will fall apart in a couple of years. Our products are built beautifully and their built to last!

Have you got any canals near you? What fantastic pieces of engineering they are. I live in a village which is near the Ashby canal, and like all canals, the only real traffice these days are pleasure barges. A hundred years ago, these same canals would be full of freight. Absolutely anything and everything being transported the length and breadth of England. If it were today, no doubt they’d be carrying our stone fireplaces too, as well as all other ‘modern’ items.

I rode my bicycle for 5 miles along the canal this sunday morning, it was very early and the people in the barges were just emerging, sitting on the roofs of their floating holiday home with the first cup of tea of the day. As it was for most of the country, Sunday morning here was very sunny, and being moored up on the edge of a grassy meadow surely took some beating as the place to be.

I don’t know if those commercial barges of 100 years ago worked on Sundays, but even if they did, there must have been many worse jobs than slowly cruising through the english countryside. It’s a bit more ‘romantic’ than the white van that your stone fireplace gets delivered in these days!

I also noticed that nearly all the barges had a little stack of logs on their roofs, and a small chimney, emerging from a little wood stove within. So they’re quite environmentally friendly places to live I suppose, and no doubt on very wooded sections of canal, as it is near where I was, the occupants can collect fuel in the form of fallen branches quite easily.

Perhaps we should look at making a ‘barge-sized’ mini stone fireplace!

At last! Glorious sunshine and lovely weather, and how long have we been waiting. Mind you, the late frosts we’ve been having seem to have ‘extended’ Spring, and as it’s my favourite time of year, that’s been a bit of a bonus! We’ve move stone fireplace carving outside, and we’re all working out in the sunshine today. It’s so much easier, and unquestionably more enjoyable, to be making our stone fireplaces out in natural light. It makes the final finishing of the stone so much easier because there is no better light than full, unfiltered, natural light.

We’re also working on a very large stone staircase at the moment, and it was proving quite difficult to fit it all into our workshop. We’ve now moved that outside too, and it makes life a whole lot easier. I visited a lovely project last night. It was a beautiful half timbered house that had been dismantled piece by piece and re-erected by the owner about 1/2 a mile away as it used to lie directly in the middle of the current M40. It is part of a rebuilt traditional farmyard, and we are trying to come up with a suitable and correct stone coping for the wall that goes around the farmhouse. The house is only about 700 yards from the motorway, and yet there were wild deer in the garden last night eating low hanging leaves from the trees… wonderful!

Today i have to look at a stone surround for a kitchen range. It’s an old grey and quite ugly thing, and the customer would like to replace it with something less gloomy. I’m sure we can provide something just perfect!

Ever noticed when looking through home interiors magazines, how many lovely rooms include a wall of bookshelves? There’s something of an air of quality about shelves full of books, (not unlike the air of quality given  by a lovely stone fireplace) I suppose it suggests that the occupant is educated and well read, not that any of the books in the pictures have necessarily been read by the current owner. Books are also like antiques, they look better with age, and of course many of them really are antiques.

We’re currently fitting a lovely, large, stone fireplace in the dining room of an old farmhouse in Staffordshire. The customer, at the same time, is covering a whole wall of the same room with book shelves. He wants to make his dining room have the feel of an old ‘london club’  Dark decor, stone fireplaces, serious literature, and no doubt a shelf of books hiding a fine selection  of  whiskey and brandy! When not used for dining, he’s got two high backed leather chairs that will sit either side of the stone fireplace, so he can warm his feet while chatting to a friend.

The whole thing is going to look fantastic, and we’ve asked if we can have some pictures of the completed room when it’s all done. We’ve almost finished our stone work, but it’ll be another couple of months before his cabinet makers have completed his book cases.

This weekend was the first time it really felt like we may get some sort of summer. We’ve had a bit of sunshine recently, but there’s always been a cold wind, and so it’s not been very summery! So hopefully now, we can forget about lighting a fire for a few months?  In England this is the best time to be doing your building work, as you are less likely to be working in wet or more importantly , frost. Frost and wet play havoc with brickwork and mortar and if you’re caught out by a hard frost you can find yourself having to re-do big sections. It’s not a problem when we fit stone fireplaces or stone stairs, as they’re always indoors, so we can easily protect them from excessive cold.

Stone mullions and door surrounds of course are a different story. As we cut our stone wet, we have to be very careful that it doesnt’ get frosted, and if there is a chance of frost we would always cover it up with hessian blankets.

The other good thing about building work in the summer is that you can just open all the doors and windows and get some air flowing round the building. Not only does this aid the drying out of plaster and mortar, but it makes the dust clear a lot quicker when we’re working on a fireplace.

Although our standard range of stone fireplace can be fitted by any competant builder, and do not need stone masonry skills, our larger and more complex bespoke stone fireplaces can need quite a lot of hand finishing once installed, and this can produce a lot of dust no matter how we try and subdue it.  Having the windows open (on hopefully a breezy day) always makes this less of a pain!

We can supply many types of dog basket for your stone fireplace. We show a small selection on our fireplace accessories page, but if you have seen another type you like then please let us know and we will get one similar for you.

We only sell one make of wood stove. These are the Hunter range: A very good british made stove, and we normally find that a Hunter herald 8 ( or a 14 ) for large rooms, both looks good in a stone fireplace, and also provides a lot of heat. The key to efficient wood burning though, as ever, is ensuring that you only burn seasoned (dried) timber, and if you can get oak or ash, then all the better as they are by far the best wood to burn.

A wood burner in your stone fireplaces is a surprisingly maintenance free device. By burning dry wood, very little ash is produced, and you will find that you only have to empty your ash ‘pan’ about once evert two weeks. Also, as a wood stove is a closed heating appliance, it does not produce much dust or ash into the air, so again it need not be a ‘messy’ way to heat your home.

More and more these days, you’ll see where logs are actually used as decor. vertical piles of evenly sized split logs piled up either side of a stone fireplace, is a common illustration in contemporary home improvement magazines at the moment, and it means you can have a ready supply of fuel near to your fire, and that it gets a bit of extra drying in your house prior to burning!

There’s nothing nicer in a home than a roaring open log fireplace in a big solid stone fireplace. You only have to look in any reference book about old english houses, and you’ll find pictures of such fireplaces. They were of course a functional device. They were there 100% to heat the house! No central heating, double glazing or efficient insulation to help keep buildings warm, so the only source of heat was the fireplace, and so they made them big and kept them burning. Off course, as has always been the case, an open fire does look great, but it is highly inefficient as most of the heat goes straight up the chimney.

If people back then had learnt the technology of the wood stove, then they’d have enjoyed far more comfortable winters! I’m not sure when some bright spark first caught on the the advantages of a stove over an open fire, but it was a point of inspiration. Call it a wood stove; wood-burner or whatever you like, the essential advantage is that it gives you control over the rate at which you burn your fuel. Instead of stone fireplaces where the logs just burn at whatever rate they ‘can’… a stove controls the entry of the combustion air. It also allows the heat to be absorbed by the body of the stove. Most importantly though, it allows the reduction of the normally massive flue cross section, down to a size of typically 6″ diameter. The rest of the flue being ‘blocked off’ by steel or asbestos-type sheeting. This means the heat radiated from the stove comes into the room instead of zooming up the chimney above your stone fireplace.

One could argue that stone fireplaces do look their absolute best with a roaring open fire, but in these days of expensive fuel, and rising prices, perhaps the wood stove is the best way to go!

There are hundreds of different types of stone from which you could make a stone fireplace.  We favour Limestone for ours because it is a fairly neutral colour (ie doesn’t clash with anything) It has a lovely natural texture, and it is very practical, durable, and good value. We have made our stone fireplaces from many other stones, notably a lot in sandstone, and we can still work with sandstone if you have some that you would like turning into a stone fireplace. Sandstone is harder to work, and our masons are not very keen on it, because of the silica dust produced when carving it. (a cause of silicosis)

We currently use a quarry in Northern France for our Limestone as it has the perfect combination of texture and colour. We are also looking at some quarries in Spain that also produce stone that is perfect for  stone fireplaces, but we are waiting for some samples, and need to work out the cost of shipping.

We are also currently working on some new designs for fireplaces. All based on genuine historical examples from period buildings.

Is that what we’re going to have in the uk? and what does it really mean?  Does it mean we won’t have any new laws passed because the parties will never agree to vote them through the house ( a good thing!) and does it mean all those MPs can now just sit on their benches, taking their excessive salaries/expenses and yet have nothing to do because they’re part of an unworkable government. No one seems to know, and I wish someone would explain.

Of course what we’re really concerned about, is whether this uncertainty will affect small businesses like ours. Will it make people do more home improvement (and install more stone fireplaces) or will it make them unsure about the future, and put off their renovations and leave buying a lovely stone fireplace or stone staircase until the economic climate is more secure.

Apparently it’s 36 years since the last ‘hung’ parliament, and although plenty of us were around then, I’m not sure many can remember the effects it had on the ‘common citizen’ I suppose we’ve just got to wait and see what happens.

We’ve just made some lovely stone copings for a low wall round the front of a restored farmhouse in Warwickshire. They are slightly weathered (angled) to let rainfall run off, but are flat enough to make a comfortable seat. We’ve used a nice open grained but hard limestone, and the copings will therefore look oldish straight away and will soon take on a lovely patina.

Stonemasonry is one of the oldest crafts. Man has worked with stone since the earliest time, although obviously his first ‘product’ probably wasn’t a stone fireplace! His first work with stone was probably smoothing the floor of a cave perhaps, (to get a better night’s sleep?) or maybe chipping off some sharp corners to  the cave entrance? Perhaps it was piling up stone to enclose domesticated animals, or simply the shaping of flints into tools and weapons. What is certain, is that man realised the versatility of stone at a very early stage. He realised that it was a very tough and durable material, and that it could help him in many ways to make life easier. He may not have built a sweeping stone stair case for many thousands of years, but he certainly use stone as steps (no matter how crude) or learnt to cut steps into a stone face of slope to enable easier climbing.

He must also have soon realised that some stones were much easier to work than others, and thus adapted different stones for different uses.

Our masons have accumulated similar skills, although they have little in common with those early stone workers. We have access to power tools and massive stone saws so that we can quickly cut stone into blocks that are easier to handle and move. Modern masons’ tools have also benefitted from thousands of years of evolution, and a skilled mason can turn a seemingly dull lump of stone into a stunning stone fireplace or stone staircase with minimal physical exertion. His most important tool is always his eye! He needs to check at every stage that the stone he is removing is going to leave the lovely stone fireplace that the drawings depict.