Natural Stone Fireplace Design: Traditional fireplace designs!

A real natural stone fireplace easily creates a traditional fireplace design. That's a fireplace not made from stone slices or stone shaped pieces but whole stones more or less as found. Traditional can mean several things, but this traditional fireplace category meaning from the past, historically, fireplaces found, built and used in older period houses.

Traditional natural stone fireplace is characteristic of using larger local or imported full size stones. This establishes a fireplace design that creates a room presence. Natural stone imperfections, variety of sizes and shapes can be mixed in or bended out by matching up similar colors or textures. Real stone mortar joints can have deep joints if you wish, vary in thickness, unlike that when using thin stone facing fireplace materials.

If you’re considering real stone, a large room, high ceiling or long wall allows one more design flexibility in choosing the size of stones. If you are able to use local stones then some savings can be realized .. especially if the stones are found right on your own property.

A design bonus with larger room sizes, higher ceilings or two storey great rooms comes the ability to create fireplaces with larger hearths. Larger fireplace hearth with more height and width allows one to build a larger fire. Bigger logs, bigger fire and higher flames creates an impressive fireplace .. thus more room dominance and impact from your fireplace design.

Selecting a knowledgeable skilled mason can be a task. The older skilled masons are retiring leaving less choice around. One way to source a full time mason is to contact your local masonry building supply where they buy their stone. Or best, drop in and see what stones they supply and what masons they might recommend.

Once you settled on a mason don’t be afraid to suggest ideas for your fireplace design. Many good designs are compilations of the builder, the owner and other fireplace designs found in magazines and on the internet.

In the end, a real natural stone fireplace design can be uniquely distinctive and be an exclusive design addition to your home.