What makes a home? Is the roof providing cover? Are the walls providing protection? How about the beds and furniture providing rest? Hands down, through the centuries the value of a home has been measured in its warmth. Literary legends talked about the hearth and the warmth of a house fire in the cold of the night.
The classic warmth has been the living room fireplace. Yet modern homes continue to push for centralization of the heating, providing heat in each room efficiently with ducts and vents, but also losing the personal feel of fire. There’s something primal and fundamental about a flame. It’s dangerous, it burns anything quickly, but the heat is tremendous as well. It fills a room, changes the immediate atmosphere, and it makes a home feel like a real home.
In the early days, the fireplace was a multi-functional resource. It provided a place for cooking as well as protection from the cold. Homes were smaller then, with much of the family area centered around the cooking place and fire hearth. Then, the average income increased in the 19th century, and the common person began to have a bigger home. To accommodate, people moved coals around as well as built homes with multiple fireplaces as well.
Fast-forward to the 20th century, the fireplace was almost lost. It seemed to become a relic of earlier homebuilding, almost disappearing with the climate-oriented perspective of less smog in neighborhoods during cold nights and eventually the concern about carbon release. However, then came the advent of being creative with natural gas-powered fireplaces and heating elements.
For many years, natural gas was just that, a fuel source plumbed into homes for the stove, the home furnace and maybe a water boiler. However, nothing stopped it from being used to also provide the most fundamental form of heat as well, the fireplace. And that became the catalyst for creative fireplace design as well.
Today, the designs possible in making fire even more integrated with home life are simple and visually amazing. In some respects, the models available tend to make a person slap their forehead and go, why didn’t I think of that? In other cases, they show amazing artistic elegance that amazes people repeatedly every time the assembly is seen and operated.
Some of the best designs today are now available internationally. These systems include the background of their designers with an aim to show the elegance of the design developed, how it reflects the designer’s culture and dedication to art and functionality, as well as the modernization of the fireplace or heating element. Here are some of the best examples available today.
BioFlame – A Step Into the Future of Comfort
BioFlame is a fireplace and heating element designer that evokes the history of the north, the mysticism of the Viking age, and the illumination of modern flame use in a future home setting. The framework of these pieces are fundamentally constructed around plumbed natural gas flame. However, the aesthetics they are surrounded with takes a homeowner and visitor to a new place altogether. For someone who wants a fireplace or heating element to remember, BioFlame is always going to be the one that sets the standards for most others in the industry.
Polyflam – An Approach to Furniture for Tomorrow
Borrowing an emphasis on visual display and design, almost out an illustration poster, Polyflam produces multiple models of fireplaces and heating elements that evoke everything from comfort to catchy eye-pieces that generate their own discussion and attention. The company also handles fully traditional fireplace hearths as well as vented window pieces and glass placements.
Wittus – A Cross-Pond Combination of Old-World New-World Design
Based in the U.S. but rooted in Denmark family history, Wittus provides a combination of modern fireplace design and colonial Americana fireplace and heating elements. Everything from home living room stoves to eclectic fireplace designs for indoor and outdoor enjoyment, Wittus covers the spectrum.
