Design pros across Utah spark big style with ten fireplaces ranging from fresh traditional to cutting-edge modern.
By Brad Mee, Photos by Scot Zimmerman
We focus our furniture on it, hang art and flat screens above it and gather friends and family around it. The fireplace is the centerpiece of most every room it inhabits, and commands attention and ardor like no other feature in the home. No wonder we get so stoked about perfecting its design, style and scale. Fortunately, Utah pros provide plenty of inspiration and ideas for finessing the fireplace by combining head-turning forms, surprising surfaces and dynamic details on their creations. The following 10 get us fired up.
To enhance the contemporary style of this Park City home, architect Scott Jaffa created a striking offset horizontal firebox surrounded by light gray marble slabs. Darker gray limestone frames the dynamic focal point with bold lines and depth.
A cantilevered exhaust hood suspends above a linear fireplace that extends indoors from the patio of Steve and Kathy Stanton’s Park City home. A steel hearth caps the feature’s barnwood base.
In a stately Draper home, the classic beauty of a traditional fireplace surround extends upward from the mantel courtesy of a large mirror framed with a custom steel grid designed by Lane Myers Construction and fabricated by 3x Specialties.
In a Park City home, strong horizontal lines define a family room fireplace designed by LMK Interior Design. Thick lengths of clean-lined quartzite tame the pattern-rich rock façade while bronze metal firewood niches perform like modern sculptures at each end of the large-scale feature.
Architect Scott Jaffa’s bold design balances the strong verticality of the fireplace in a Park City home’s breakfast room. “I used horizontal steel C channels to make the room feel more horizontal and to add a sense of whimsy,” he says. The mountain-modern firebox rests on a more traditional stone slab hearth.
A wall of built-in cabinetry anchors the living room of a Montage Deer Valley residence and hosts a firebox framed with a traditional stone surround. Design by Beth Ann Shepherd, the feature boasts large inset mirrors that bookend the fireplace and flat screen niche with reflections of light and color.
In a Deer Valley home’s study, designer Cody Beal installed a beefy chamfered Indiana limestone surround that suits the large size of the sophisticated room and softens the transition from the deep firebox to the cerused oak paneling and bookcases. “The scale of any fireplace should relate to the volume and space plan of the room in which it resides,” Beal says.
To prevent this fireplace from upstaging the striking modern shelves beside it, Markay Johnson Construction colored the textured chimney and the room’s walls the same shade of white. A low hearth and horizontal firebox support the room’s organic, modern vibe.
Designer Michele Dunker gave a modest firebox a big presence by surrounding it in herringbone patterned tile and a stately mantel that she integrated into a wall dressed in classic woodwork and large crown moldings
For a St. George home, architect Arthur Dyson designed an 18-foot ledge stone fireplace that extends through a wall of glass from a spacious living room onto an outdoor patio. A fire ribbon accentuates the interior’s low, horizontal firebox.
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