FIREPLACES

nterior designer Thomas Hamel says a fireplace is the perfect focal I Home and

hearth

A welcoming fireplace will be a big selling point for prestige homes this winter season

Fireplaces

JOEL ROBINSON point for many interior spaces. “Fireplaces have always played an important role in my thoughts when designing a room,” he says.

Heading into what is likely to be a busier than normal winter sales season, fireplaces are certainly set to be an alluring feature in the marketing of prestige homes. Indeed their increasingly cool style is almost as important as their practicality.

“Obviously in history, fireplaces were of great importance for the required heat they generated,” Hamel says, while adding that these days they are not so much a necessity as a desirable design feature.

“There is nothing quite like the glow and warmth, perceived or actual, that comes from an open flame,” he says. With international travel not on the agenda this winter, vendors will be lighting their open-for-inspection fireplaces to welcome prospective buyers.

In a renovated 1930s South Yarra townhouse, the fireplace in the living area takes centre stage. Owner Sarah Madders, of interior design firm Wash Studio, paid $1.27 million for the Avoca Street property in 2011 and handled the renovation. She had Anchor Ceramics custom-make the tiled open fireplace where a former fireplace had been located but hidden away.

“The fireplace gets used a lot during winter,” Madders says. “It’s the perfect place to have a glass of red wine on a cold, wintry night.”

The living area meets a separate dining room, across the central hallway from the marble kitchen and separate meals area, which opens through custom steel-framed doors to a new courtyard designed by Eckersley Garden Architecture.

Upstairs there are three bedrooms and two marble bathrooms. Kay & Burton South Yarra agents Nicole Gleeson and Nicky Rowe have a $3.1 million to $3.3 million guide for the auction on June 20 .

Recently a Brighton home on New Street with a classic fireplace, one of four in the home, sold for $3,300,500 through Marshall White Bayside agents Ben Veith and Dahli Woosnam.

The latest trend in fireplace design is the suspended style, some of which even rotate. They may have been around for five or so decades, with French designer Dominique Imbert’s suspended, rotatable flying-saucer-shaped Gyrofocus fire, a 50-year-old design classic worthy of any James Bond

Clockwise from below: Flinders suspended fireplace; Ruskin Rowe, Avalon; renovated 1930s South Yarra townhouse; and New Street, Brighton

villain’s lair, but The Block brought them into the spotlight again as a feature of Norm and Jess’s penthouse, which featured a fireplace suspended over a marble slab.

The Block judge and interior design expert Neale Whitaker even installed one in his South Coast home.

Despite social distancing, nothing brings people together better than a warm fire on a cold day, says Impact Realty Group Mt Eliza agent Candice Blanch, who is marketing a Flinders home with a rotatable suspended fireplace.

It hangs as a feature of the open plan living area which opens to an outdoor kitchen, solar heated pool and spa.

The fully automated four-bed home with polished concrete floors was built by Swell Building Group and comes with a 500- bottle wine cellar.Blanch has a $2.8 million to $3 million guide.

“The builders have used this fireplace in a few of their builds,” she says. “It’s been really well received by purchasers.”

Richard Ellis, who runs the hand-carved fireplace design firm Richard Ellis Design, says for modern and contemporary interiors, large, simple moulds and/or architraves are well suited to decorating the fireplace opening, but if the desired look is more classical French and English styles offer myriad solutions.

The current interest in fireplace design in Australia evolved from the 1970s passion for period home restoration, Ellis says.

“Homeowners, designers and builders alike looked to the pattern books of the makers of Regency, Victorian, and Edwardian periods for inspiration. Being the central element and defining feature of the interior for these periods, the fireplace surrounds typically set the decoration style for the whole room.”

A 1960s Sydney home on Ruskin Rowe, Avalon, on the market for $3.8 million to $4.1 million, has a double-sided sandstone gas fireplace at the centre of its lounge room. The opposite side has the fireplace on the deck. Raine & Horne Avalon agents Nina Sokolov and Lara Rowell have the listing.