If you live in Britain and have a house that is over 50 years old, chances are you have a fireplace somewhere. The house I grew up in was built in 1925 and is in a suburb of a small town close to Nottingham in central England. It had sadly lost its bedroom fireplaces, but the living room and dining room both had working chimneys and over the years these two fireplaces were put back in and I loved them.
Even though I fondly remember enjoying the open fire in the living room when I was a child, in reality we didn't light it that often. Open fires are wonderful, but as anyone who has one knows, they create a lot of work. Over the years when I've lived in houses with fireplaces, I've often used them to light candles. I once lived in a room in Florence Street London which had a fireplace. I'd sit there on summer evenings by my windowsill garden, candles burning in my fire, with the feeling that life couldn't possibly be any better.
Here in No 19 there is one main chimney perched on top of the house which serves the front rooms, and a small chimney at the back used for the kitchen stove which is essential for heating the house during the cold months.
When it came to doing up the first floor living room which is over the kitchen, I wanted to make the most of the access to this small chimney and put in a stove. But as often happens in old houses, things didn't go to plan.
The chimney access had been blocked up probably because this chimney is actually too small for more than one stove, and so my plans had to change. The room has so much potential but was a terrible mess and in need of much more work than I'd initially imagined.
After opening up the original doorway to the corridor and stabilising the mud wall, I needed an area I could hide some electricity cables. I also wanted a focus for the room...so I decided to spark my imagination and get creative!
I'd already built a fake fireplace in one of the bedrooms which somehow gave this small room a sense of proportion. I sleep in this room during the winter and it really is lovely seeing a fireplace...even one that doesn't work!
For the living room I wanted the fireplace to have the feeling of always having been there even though this room would probably never have originally had one.
It needed to be large but dainty enough to give the room proportion, and it needed to not be perfect! I wanted cracks, chips, worn down stone; I wanted 300 years of ware.
I've always loved carved stone 17th century fireplaces, and this was my chance to have one... well, kind of. I found a photo of one I liked on Pinterest, scaled up the measurements to the size I wanted, and using Ytong concrete blocks, I started carving mine out.
I know! There's something a little strange about making and adding a fake fireplace to an old house and I'm sure there are many people who believe that it's just not right. I get that, I really do, but I genuinely believe that the room will look and feel better for it.
The way I see it, is that this particular room is around 230 years old. The floor is probably from the 1900s, the windows from the 1960s, and the cat from 2019! It has an electrical heater from the 1990s and now it's going to have a 17th century fireplace built in 2023!
Carving it was a lot simpler than I'd imagined. It didn't have to have a lot of fine detail as I wanted it to look as if it had been there acquiring paint year after year for centuries.
I put down a concrete foundation and the using old terracotta tiles, I created a rustic base for my fire. Once I'd finished the construction and plastered, I painted it using the white of the room which is a kind of lime whitewash.
I then painted the inside dark with black and beige acrylic paint and chipping away the original plaster wall that forms the fireback, archived the crumbly, sooty fireplace look I wanted.
I took an old fire grate my father bought years ago and, once I'd cleaned up, I sat and relaxed with candles burning in the grate and the sounds of the night outside in the garden below.
However, this is just the start! I've bought loads of antique furniture for almost nothing from a fabulous shop in Prague and I've not got to think about recovering it all. I've also got a door to make but I can't even think about that yet!
Frappis wants large patchwork and contrasting fabrics with an orientalist theme. We've thrown a few things in there to get an idea of how it might look... and I have a feeling I'm going to have a very busy winter 💙
