HOME DESIGN : HEARTH BEAT : Antique Fireplaces Draw New Interest as Decorating Centerpieces

Helen Guiltinan couldn’t believe her luck.

She and her husband John had traveled Europe taking photographs and researching how they could create an authentic 17th-Century living room for their custom French chateau-style house to be built in Cowan Heights.

And here was an antique dealer offering her an opportunity to purchase, from a photograph, an exquisite antique green marble fireplace front that appeared to be an exact copy of one she had seen in France’s famed Versailles.

“You can’t even begin to think what a fit we had,” recalls Guiltinan. “John and I saw this (the original) and took pictures of it in Versailles before we ever found this.”

This passion to find just the right antique fireplace front is not all that unusual. Buck Bradley searched for an antique fireplace for his Orange home for three years before he finally found the one he wanted. The circa 1870 piece is made of dark-finished oak, has beautiful hand carving, an oval mirror and came from the Midwest.

Alan Barbee had already purchased an antique oak fireplace for his Santa Ana home when he located another he liked even better because of its delicately carved columns and classic lines indicating its origins in the South in the 1870s.

Architect Vincent Di Biasi of Vincent Di Biasi Architects in Irvine designs a lot of traditional style homes and says clients often want antique fireplaces. Usually the client goes out and finds the fireplace, and it’s the architect’s job to incorporate it into the design. One home he designed two years ago in Irvine has five antique fireplaces, each carefully selected by the homeowner for specific rooms of the house.

Antique fireplaces (including the mantle and other construction framing the opening of a firebox) are popular in Orange County. Homeowners find that an antique fireplace is a charming, one-of-a-kind focal point on which to base the design of a room.

In fact, old fireplace fronts are so popular that prices have risen 300% in the last couple of years, according to Kay Keddie, whose Liberty Bell Antiques in Orange specializes in selling them.

And they are getting harder to find because fewer become available as their value grows, Orange County antique dealers say.

American-made oak fireplaces are perhaps most available. French and English fireplaces, which might be wood, marble or even pewter, are more difficult to find these days as more Europeans decide to hold onto these handcrafted works.

But several antique dealers in Orange County are able to keep at least a few of the popular items in stock. Prices range from around $300 for a small mantle to $15,000 and far beyond for fireplaces with intricate and unusual craftsmanship.

Guiltinan declines to say what she paid for her marble masterpiece but says, “I could probably not buy this for $125,000 today.”

Her fireplace, which measures just under nine feet across and stands seven feet high, is a stunning combination of swirling black-green and soft-green colors. It took six men to lift the top piece of the mantle into place. The casting style of the gold-colored cast bronze adornments--the head of Hercules, a medallion with Zeus, Napoleonic lions and cornucopias of fruit--indicate that it is 150 to 250 years old, according to Guiltinan.

It may sound imposing and a bit ornate, but Guiltinan, an interior decorator, has made it work. The fireplace is the centerpiece of a room filled with antiques and clever reproductions, and it has soft gold-colored walls that seem bathed in light.

Plaster acanthus leaves painted with gold leaf ring the ceiling and on the same wall as the fireplace there is a trompe l’oeil (painting that fools the eye), of what Guiltinan calls her “Renaissance Man,” that greets those entering the room. With French marches playing in the background, it seems that at any minute the Three Musketeers or the Count of Monte Cristo will dash into the room, swords in hand.

Guiltinan says that many people are overwhelmed by the sight of the fireplace at first. But then they “start to look at it” she says and they see “it’s not a cold marble fireplace. It’s filled with character. It has life and depth.”

The oak fireplace front in Barbee’s family room may not be as elaborate as Guiltinan’s, but he seems just as happy with it. “I had never seen one exactly like that, but in my mind I had envisioned what I wanted to own,” says the Los Angeles County fire fighter. “I have a lot of old, large oak pieces. I wanted to redo this room, and I wanted something that would stand out.”

The fireplace stands about eight feet high and is a bit more than five feet wide.

To install it, Barbee added a layer of bricks over an existing brick fireplace and a raised hearth, in a pattern popular in the late 1800s. Barbee used wood wedges to fit the oak fireplace tightly against the ceiling. He then covered the wedges with wood molding.

Barbee also kept the first fireplace he found, which is made of tiger oak (circa 1880). He’s creating a fake fireplace in his living room, using antique oak bedrails to form a frame for a brick hearth. Then he will use an antique tin ceiling and an old stained-glass window, which he will light, to fill the fireplace opening.

Bradley, a mechanical engineer, also collects antiques. He chose his 7-by-6-foot oak fireplace front because it had just enough carving to suit him and because the grain of the wood was the finest he had seen. Others he saw had either too much carving or not enough. This one cost him about $5,500, and removal of an old fireplace mantle and installation of the new one was about $1,800.

The antique wood fireplace had to be lifted off the floor to keep it the proper distance from the opening of the existing firebox. He decided on a peach marble hearth to complement peach-colored ceramic tile on the floor of his family room.

Architect Di Biasi says installing antique fireplace fronts can be tricky. One problem with wood fireplace fronts is that combustible materials must be kept to a minimum of a foot from the opening of fireboxes. In some instances, the size of the opening of antique fireplace fronts might require the firebox openings to be too small. “So the scale you have to work in, everything changes,” he says, “ . . the sizes of the flues . . . the amount of the masonry you have to use.”

His solution to this problem in the Irvine house with five antique fireplaces was to make the fireboxes deeper and gain the distance horizontally rather than vertically.

The fireplaces in that house include: an 1880s 11-foot-high French dark walnut fireplace with a 26-inch-high clock carved into the mantle, about $15,000; a delicate French walnut mantle with a faced carved into it, about $4,000; a dark oak French fireplace front with a motto in French--”do what you must, suffer what you will and you will have wisdom and virtue”--painted across it in gold leaf, circa 1880s; a 1900 pewter fireplace front from England; and an English dark oak fireplace front with intricate carving.

Mike Erickson, manager of Lyman Drake Antiques in Santa Ana, says that anyone purchasing an antique fireplace front should work closely on installation plans with someone familiar with the pertinent fire codes.

“There’s been a number of times through the years where people have bought one and . . . they’ve run into problems and not been able to use them,” Erickson says. People sometimes get carried away, especially at auctions he says, and purchase an antique fireplace without understanding the problems of getting one installed.

Lyman Drake currently has about eight antique English and French mantles in stock, ranging in price from $600 to $7,500, according to Erickson.

Liberty Bell Antiques in Orange specializes in American wood fireplace fronts and usually has about 50 in stock. Keddie, who owns the business with partner Bela Spanyol, says they used to be able to purchase fireplace fronts by the truckload, 100 at a time. Those she has in stock now range from $295 to $15,000.

Wilbur Leeper of Leeper’s Antiques in Orange says, “I don’t have very many anymore. It’s hard to get them.” But he adds, “We sell all we can get. We have only two now. That’s the least we’ve ever had.” In the past, he says, he’s sold “hundreds and hundreds.”

He thinks that part of the reduced availability is because fewer old homes and buildings are being torn down these days.

And Erickson says that in the last five years the French have developed an appreciation for their own antique fireplace fronts. “We are now in competition with the home market to purchase these, where before . . . these houses were demolished and the mantles didn’t have much value and it was quite easy to come upon them.”

But even this reduced availability is not likely to stop the search of determined homeowners who want just the right antique fireplace to add richness to their surroundings.

Keddie, for instance, decided to specialize in the fireplaces when she had difficulty finding the right one for her home. Eventually she found one that gave her “goose bumps” the first time she saw it.

“I knew I would own it,” she says.

This one-of-a-kind fireplace front with intricate carving by a master Italian craftsman has a light tiger oak finish and is the focal point of Keddie’s home.

She says she’s been offered as much as $45,000 for this 1875 fireplace, but she still says no sale. “I wouldn’t take any kind of money for it,” Keddie says.