Hearth And Home -- No Matter The Style, The Fireplace Is Still A Favorite Gathering Place

Cicero's renown as an interior designer might be a bit far-fetched, but the Roman orator certainly had timeless vision when it came to the vitality of the hearth in the typical home.

"Nullus est locus domestica sede jucundior," Cicero said. Translation? "No place is more delightful than one's own fireside."

Since the earliest days of human evolution, we've gathered around a fire for warmth, food preparation and friendly encounters. Thomas Jefferson called the happiness of the domestic fireside "the first boon of mankind," adding, "and it is well it is so, since it is that which is the lot of the mass of mankind."

Today, the hearth still carries the romance of a home, especially at this time of year. Modern-day dwellings might not rely on a fireplace for heat or food preparation, although the fireplace persists as a design focal point in the living room, family room and sometimes even the bedroom.

Margaret Newton at Newton Associates Architects near Northgate said the concepts of hearth and home are still very much alive. "But fireplaces are more symbolic than functional anymore," Newton said.

The hearth, because it remains at the core of home activity, can present formidable decorating decisions. For better or worse, the look of a fireplace often sets a tone for the whole house.

Seattle-area homeowners who proudly display their accomplishments with fireplaces are the first to concede they had fears and doubts at the outset. Who wouldn't, when your scheme involves spending $3,300 on handcrafted tile for just one of your home's three fireplaces? Or deciding to paint your hearth bright salmon pink? Or facing up to a bad choice you made only a few years ago and forking out $1,000 to correct it? Or hiring a struggling artist to provide a new face for two stories of multi-colored brick?

Patricia Gordon of Issaquah said she knew she didn't want to make a career out of her fireplace. Still, when she and her husband moved into their 13-year-old home nine months ago, she realized she couldn't live with the invasive mass of red, black and white used brick that shot up to the vaulted ceiling in both the living room and family room.

Through a decorator she'd met, she heard about David Sessions, a Seattle artist who agreed to glaze the brick for $300.

"I told my husband, `Say a little prayer that I picked the right guy,' " Gordon said.

Gordon asked Sessions to soften the colors of the brick and try to pick up the subtle tones of rose and blue from a chair and ottoman she plans to use as an accent near the raised hearth in the living room.

She said she briefly watched him literally scrub the walls with color he had mixed into a semi-transparent colorless glaze. There was still uncertainty, though.

"I wasn't so sure I wanted to watch," Gordon said. "So I told him to call me when it was over."

Sessions said he made several applications of the washy glaze with a large brush.

"I'll be up there with rags and brushes looking like a street musician with all these things jangling off me," he described. "With this brick, I didn't want to wipe out the whole thing, just tone it into her color scheme. A lot of it is a matter of practicality, what'll stay on, and what'll work."

Gordon likes the results as well as the cost. Now she has a mammoth brick hearth that isn't so earthy and is better suited to her style.

Sessions, a decorative painter in the Seattle area for three years, said homeowners typically express misgivings first about painting over brick, which, like natural wood, is often considered sacred. Their next concern is whether his workmanship will last. "I use an oil-based product. It might chip, but it will age as gracefully as anything does in a home," he said.

Sessions recently worked on a den fireplace in a Queen Anne showhouse, a November fund-raiser for the Variety Club orchestrated by the Northwest Society of Interior Designers.

"It has a semi-smooth brick front that I painted out with a reddish sienna glaze over white to give it a glowing quality that keys to the wall color," he said.

Sessions also does faux marble finishes on both furniture and fireplaces. For a Kirkland designer whose color scheme spanned strong reds, pinks, oranges and gold he created a fantasy marble look for her brick fireplace, which became faux pink marble with gold veining.

"A lot of things may not be to my own taste," he said with a laugh.

Pink might not be for everybody, but Lynn Elston of Edmonds is known as the woman who painted her fireplace salmon pink.

Elston's living room, with its fine view of sunsets over Puget Sound, features a pair of Louis XV knock-off chairs covered in blue and salmon fabric. Her oriental rugs and other decorative embellishments, especially her collection of ornate horses, also pick up the salmon color. Before she attacked it with a can of salmon-colored latex with an eggshell gloss, her brick hearth was what she described as drab post- office yellow.

"I like color. I also like the coolness of the windows and the view of the Sound during the day and the warmth of the fire at night," Elston said.

She knew it was a bold move, but she has no regrets. At night, when the water view loses its attraction and becomes more of a black hole, the salmon-colored hearth draws attention, which is precisely what Elston hoped to achieve.

Dianne Blumberg wasn't so lucky, at least not the first time around. When this mortgage broker built her Bellevue home two years ago, she carried the Southwestern theme of other living areas into her den, where she used ceramic tile to surround her gas fireplace.

"The whole house, with all the tile and hardwood, had a cold feeling about it. This room especially couldn't be Southwest because it just wasn't warm and cozy enough for a den," Blumberg said.

Her green leather couches remain, but she added white carpeting with a subtle green fleck and started over on the fireplace, this time opting for verde green marble tiles. The tiles cost $500, she estimated, and the whole makeover, including labor, about $1,000. She chose a simple yet heavy beveled glass fireplace screen on a brass base.

"I think it turned out to be more elegant than I expected," she said with satisfaction.

Blumberg noted her fireplace could burn wood, although she prefers gas logs. "I didn't want the hassles of hauling in wood," she said. "Besides, this isn't for heating the house. It's just for cosmetics."

Several Seattle-area tile and stone dealers' fireplace facelifts frequently mean a switch from wood to gas, but not always.

The same holds true for new homes. Jo Anne and Bob Hacker, who together operate a direct-mail business, have three fireplaces in their new house in Kirkland. The living-room and family-room fireplaces burn wood. The handcrafted tile hearth in the master suite on the second floor is a gas-fired unit. Each has its own distinct personality tailored to fit the function and mood of three very different areas in the Hacker home on Lake Washington.

Although she has lived there about six months now, Jo Anne Hacker has mixed feelings about her living-room fireplace, made of marble tile that cost about $1,000. It's the only fireplace in the home with a mantel, which provides a spot for art objects. And while the fireplace might suit the formality of the living room, marble is not Hacker's favorite medium.

"I didn't want any marble in the house at all. It has become a cliche and it's so ostentatious," she said.

She's much happier with the family-room fireplace, a corner affair with a raised hearth done in Idaho quartzite tiles from Pratt & Larson Tile at Pioneer Square.

"With a fireplace, you can be conspicuous or inconspicuous. This one is low-contrast and inconspicuous," Hacker said. "The raised hearth creates a real friendly feeling so people can sit there. And they often do."

When the family-room fire is burning - and both of the home's wood-burning fireplaces have handy gas starters - the mica in the natural stone-colored quartzite has a mirrorlike silvery shimmer.

According to Terri Boyd at Pratt & Larson, quartzite is especially easy to maintain. It's harder than granite, requires no sealing and there's no worrying about hot embers scorching it. Boyd said tiles for this fireplace ran $600.

The home's piece de resistance, however, is upstairs in the master-suite sitting room. When Jo Anne Hacker selected the handmade tile for this fireplace, she also turned to the talents of Margaret Newton, an architect who considers tile design to be icing on the cake for someone in her profession. Newton had worked on other projects with the Seattle staff at Ann Sacks Tile & Stone, supplier of the tiles for the upstairs hearth in the Hacker home.

Newton's sole function at the Hacker home was to draft a plan for the master-suite fireplace tiles. "We were working with tile that was so romantic and wonderfully representative of the medieval period. We carefully considered every tile that went into it," Newton said.

"It was all a matter of how rich or dense the textures would be. I came up with two concepts that were fairly similar, both with a traditional concentric design. The fireplace itself was like a picture with its own ornate gilded frame. There are suggestions of a mantel without actually having one there."

Hacker chose the green and gold tiles to give the master suite a warm, earthy, relaxing and friendly feeling. "The room is very mellow, so it could take a strong, Germanic focal point," she said. "It's one of those things people either love or hate. Who knows? The next owners might want to rip it out."

Newton's perspective is a bit different.

"Houses today don't have age or weight to them," she said. "I think people try to bring that depth into a new home with rustic, rich designs like this."

Handmade tiles alone for the one fireplace cost the Hackers more than $3,300. Jo Anne Hacker, however, isn't complaining. She has what she wants.

"Some people become so worried about doing it wrong that they never do anything," she said. But that's not exactly her style.