Fireplaces are highly popular home features, and innovative styles provide numerous options suitable for modern homes with contemporary design. A fireplace is typically the centerpiece in a room, and it adds an element of comfort to any home. Gas and wood fireplaces each have their benefits, and both fuel type offers many options in modern styles that ideally complement contemporary décor.
Modern Fireplace Styles
Gas Fireplaces
The options in fireplaces today can be astonishing, due to the uniqueness of various styles. Gas fireplaces offer convenience and tremendous versatility. Linear fireplaces, for example, can be installed within walls at various heights. They can also be used as room dividers. Instead of gas logs, which can be very realistic, flames can burn on a display of glass, rocks, or faux embers. The sleek rectangular shape creates a starkly different setting, as compared to traditional masonry fireplaces.
A gas linear fireplace, for example, could be built at a height that comes about 6 inches higher than the back of a sofa. Rather than the furniture facing the fireplace, the sofa could be flush against the wall, with the fireplace directly behind it. This modern look doesn’t have a mantel, but the wall around the fireplace could display one color above and below the fireplace and another on the walls to both sides of it.
Another distinctive modern fireplace style is a gas fireplace displayed in a simple circle. The look is completely different from styles of the past, making it truly contemporary and distinctive.
Fire as a design element is as much about creativity as it is about adding heat to a home. Sometimes heating has little, if anything, to do with the style. For example, one unique “fireplace” displays a vertical rectangle with vertical steel poles that resemble a slender outcropping of bamboo, much like slightly crisscrossed long sticks, from top to bottom. The flames create a single vertical line of fire in the center, from one end to the other.
Wood Fireplaces
As versatile as gas fireplaces can be, they still don’t eliminate wood fireplaces as a potentially perfect complement to modern homes. A style that can be built with a large variety of materials and colors displays a hearth-to-ceiling wall around the hearth. It has a generous opening for a wood fireplace and narrow rectangular cutouts to one side that reach up vertically and contain a supply of firewood stacked flush with the opening. The look typically doesn’t have a mantel, but a flat-panel television could be installed above the fireplace. Overall, it is a minimalist look, especially if the material is or appears to be granite or something like it.
Another very different look is very futuristic. A factory-made chimney comes down through the ceiling and opens into a wood fireplace about 2 feet off the floor in the shape of a large capsule.
Where to Shop for Modern Fireplaces
FyrePro is the leading hearth store in the Fort Collins, CO, area. Their destination showroom displays fireplaces in operation, making it easier to envision them in your own home. Among the wide selection you can find many modern fireplace designs. Contact FyrePro today by calling 970-266-8556 or by visiting the showroom located at 4631 S. Mason Street in Fort Collins, CO.