A Little Something Extra for Your Fireplace

The fireplace is always a prominent focal point in a room, whether or not there's a fire burning inside it. Because of the fireplace's significance, it and the surrounding area offer a great opportunity for embellishments that set the right tone.

1. Incorporate wood into the decor. Celebrate the fireplace's intended use by surrounding it with the wood it will need to warm those brisk evenings, as Pinnacle Architectural Studio did for this house.

Even if your fireplace is gas powered, stacking piles of logs, such as birch, next to the hearth creates an attractive connection to nature.


2. Breathe life into the room. Indoor plants also add striking natural beauty, color and texture around a fireplace, like in this room designed by Savvy Decor as part of a dream home project.

Living plants keep the air clean, too, by controlling humidity and absorbing toxins and off-gassed chemicals. Some of the best air-purifying indoor plants are the peace lily, dracaena, bamboo palm, areca palm and rubber plant.


3. Use glass details. Make fire dance by adding glass accessories in front of and around the flames. Martha's Vineyard Interior Design did just that with colored glass jars for this house remodel.


4. Offer fireside seating. Frame the flames with upholstered benches like the ones added by Chango + Co. Design as part of a whole-home makeover. Benches offer additional color and lend themselves to seating configurations that are easy to move around the room.

Caution: Make sure that if you add any flammable materials near a wood-burning flame, you give them an appropriate fire-safe clearance.


5. Go cuckoo for clocks. In an age when analog has all but disappeared, vintage-style clocks pay respect to the old ways while providing their own unique character to a mantel. Choose one clock, like the mantel in this house, designed by Thompson Naylor Architects. Or make a display of your favorites to add a pleasant ticktocking ambience.


6. Put some color into it. Architect John Lum and Em Design Interiors' Emily Mughannam worked together to inject some fun into this fireplace wall that's part of a larger San Francisco renovation. By using glass-front cabinets from Ikea, they gave the wall a custom look for a fraction of the cost of built-ins.


7. Hang unexpected art. Speaking of fun, sometimes we forget to have enough of it. Art is great way of giving a seemingly serious mantel a light-hearted mood. Let loose and show off another side of yourself that your guests might not expect.

That's what the owners of this Allegretti Architects–designed house did to give their friends a reason to take a second look, and maybe have a chuckle.


8. Add sparkle and shine in unusual forms. Mirrors are always winners over the mantel because of their ability to add extra light and the feeling of more space, as well as to enhance whatever twinkle a fire is kicking off.

And you don't have to use a standard geometric shape. The one in this Todd Richesin Interiors–designed space gives the fireplace an unanticipated touch in an otherwise traditional-style room.


9. Let the fire screen do the talking. Fire screens come in all shapes, sizes and colors. Take the elegant screen from this home designed by Anthony Michael, for example.

Traditional black or glass screens blend in with the firebox, while a screen of a different metal stands out proudly to offer another layer of beauty.


10. Get your tile on. Let your imagination go wild when it comes to tiling the fireplace surround. Who says the tiles need to be a traditional color, or only one color?

Not the owners of this house. They requested that interior designer Melanie Coddington remodel their living room around their house's existing vintage aqua and white ceramic tiles, because they loved them so much.

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