My 5 Favorite Fireplaces

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I live on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula beside the great Lake Superior. Gorgeous summer days, rustling birch trees and billowing whitecaps on the most beautiful Lake in the world – that’s my every day. It’s paradise, and I’m grateful to live here.

But paradise comes with a flip side. We call it winter. Billowing waves turn into ice volcanoes. Gale-force winds strip bare the rustling birch. When we’re lucky, winter lasts six months. If it’s a normal year, better plan on eight.

Is it any wonder then that warmth – and fireplaces – feature so prominently in Keweenaw home construction?

Perhaps because of where I live, I’ve become something of a fireplace aficionado. I shamelessly scope out hearths in the homes of my friends and neighbors.

For those who might also appreciate a cheery fire as we enter into the autumn of our long winter, please indulge me as I share five of my fireplace favorites with you.

A Hearth of Our Own

Nearest to my fireplace-loving heart is the one in our own home. When we built the house 10 years ago, a fireplace – a big one – was the focus of our living room plans.

We could have turned everything over to our contractor and been done with it, but no. I had other, more ambitious – and labor intensive – plans.

I wanted a Friendship Fireplace (and it seemed like a great idea at the time). A Friendship Fireplace comes together kind of like a quilt in a quilting bee. It’s constructed from stones given to you by friends. Each stone then has meaning and the whole fireplace warms the heart with thoughts of friends while the fire warms up the body.

All I had to do was ask my friends for rocks. How hard could that be?

I sent out an email and waited. Rocks soon began arriving in the mail or appearing on my doorstep. Geodes from Utah, pumice from Chili, a bonsai rock from Japan, fossilized bone from the top of Mont Blanc in France.

The most unusual “rocks” were two original Intel prototype chips. They’re made of gold and platinum, sent by a friend with Intel since its founding. I ended up with about 40 rocks – all of them as unique as my friends. I carefully laid them out on the plywood floor of our under-construction living room. It was like Christmas!

You may have already discerned the flaw in my enthusiasm – 40 rocks do not a fireplace make. Think more like 1,000.

Our plan called for an impressive floor-to-ceiling fireplace with a wide wraparound hearth. Where would I get the other rocks?

No problem. I’d already decided that the large rocks in the water of Copper Harbor would be perfect. Any rockhound will tell you, a rock is not just a rock. Each tells its own story. I knew the Copper Harbor rocks should tell the main story of our fireplace.

OK, one problem. Copper Harbor rocks aren’t available through any stone company or stone mason. If you want Copper Harbor rocks, you have to gather them yourself.

So gather, I did.

A friend gave me permission to take rocks from her property at the far end of Copper Harbor. During 10 days in October – 10 blessedly beautiful, summerlike days – I waded in the Lake in front of her house, plucking rocks from knee-deep water, hurling them onto the shore, and then gathering them into a wheelbarrow to haul to the back of my pickup truck. From there, I drove home to Eagle River and unloaded all of the rocks into our garage.

Before you ask, the answer is “Yes.” Yes, it was hard work, but I wanted those rocks. During this hunter-gatherer period of my life, my family and friends, without exception, thought I was nuts. I amassed four pickup loads of rocks (and used all but 20 stones). The day after I finished, it snowed.

Our stonemason, Gary Parker, arrived in February. It took him about two weeks to build the fireplace. Its supporting foundation had already been built the previous May, when the entire home foundation was poured. Every day Gary and his helper sorted through the rocks in the garage, laying them out in the living room (to be) and fitting everything together like a puzzle. When he was done, he acid washed the entire thing (to kill hitchhikers on the stones) and that was it.

All the effort and labor created our memorable Friendship Fireplace. Every single stone in it had been solicited, handled and chosen by me.

To me, it’s a beautiful piece of art. I look at the stones and think fondly of the friends who sent them and the good times we’ve shared. And I look at the core rocks and recall the work of finding and choosing them from the Lake.

Some rocks carry the weight of lost loved ones. In one gray striped rock, I envision my friend’s son, Peter, picking it up from their own beach in Montecito, California. Peter died his freshman year at Georgetown University. A heart-shaped coral calls up thoughts of friends Nancy and John strolling their favorite beach in Hawaii. John died while filming a TV show. Pam, the legal guardian of our children, discovered the sandy wormcast in the surf of Ocean Beach in San Diego. She died of colon cancer three years ago. Even Gary Parker, our gifted stonemason, died two years ago. All of their memories live here in our hearth as well as our hearts.

That’s what makes this a true Friendship Fireplace.

With true friendships, you don’t get to cherry-pick the good times. You’re in it for the bad times, too. But the glow of friendship is warmer than any flame in your fireplace, and it will see you through many a winter.

The Finn Within

When Syd and Marty Faassen built their home in Copper Harbor in 2007, they chose a Tulikivi Fireplace – a fireplace constructed from Finnish soapstone, shipped directly from Finland.

“We first heard about Tulikivi fireplaces from my old roommate from Michigan Tech,” Marty says. “He’s an engineer doing energy work, and he highly recommended it. A distributor in Kalamazoo was having an open house that weekend, so Syd and I went down to look.”

The Faassens were so impressed with the Tulikivi, they ordered it on the spot, customizing it with an additional bake oven and a wide wraparound hearth for sitting.

The Tulikivi weighs roughly 9,000 pounds and sits on a reinforced concrete and cinder block foundation. A few months after ordering it, the fireplace arrived from Finland and was reassembled and installed in one weekend.

The Tulikivi requires very dry wood, and the Faassens prepare their own wood, getting in a large supply of full-size logs every summer. “I cut the lengths, and Syd splits them,” says Marty, “so, obviously, there’s a commitment to wood if you own a Tulikivi. But we look at it as our gym membership.”

The efforts have all been worth it. “The Tulikivi is the center of the house, everyone gathers around it,” says Marty. “We love it and we’re really happy with it. In a normal winter it heats the whole house, but when it’s single digits and the wind is blowing we supplement with our forced air heating system.”

The Conversation Starter

When Clyde and Lloyd Wescoat bought their home in Copper Harbor, it came with a built-in conversation piece – a fireplace that covers three-fourths of the living room wall and is formed from concrete embedded with an intricate pattern of small rocks.

“It’s not a useable fireplace because the chimney is badly damaged,” says Lloyd, “and every estimate we’ve had has been way too expensive to justify fixing it. But it’s certainly a piece of art and a conversation starter.”

The house, and fireplace, were built at the turn of the century by the McDonald family. Clyde and Lloyd bought the home from Mary McDonald’s estate after her death. Mary McDonald was an early environmentalist who donated her entire estate to the Nature Conservancy, including the Mary McDonald Horseshoe Harbor Preserve managed by the conservancy.

“We don’t really know the history of the fireplace,” says Lloyd, owner of the bookstore Grandpa’s Barn.

“Who created the designs or did the work? Was the whole thing done during a house party some weekend, and how many bottles of wine were consumed? We don’t know,” she adds, “but we sure like to imagine.”

Copper Heritage Indoors

Jack Marta has always been interested in the copper heritage of the Keweenaw Peninsula – the ruins of an old copper mining operation even sit on his property, and no expert has yet been able to identify their origins.

So when he and his late wife, Louise, built their house in 2001, they were determined to bring the region’s copper history inside the house itself, specifically in the fireplace.

The fireplace and the wall it occupies is constructed of Mexican travertine, a type of limestone deposited by mineral springs.

“We wanted to use the fireplace for displaying copper pieces and artifacts,” says Jack, “and Mexican travertine provided the perfect backdrop.”

The light-colored stone does wonderfully showcase his local copper specimens, including a piece from Central Mine, float copper from Great Sand Bay and an ingot from the White Pine Mine.

The fireplace was built by their contractor and has no mechanical aids or electrical assists.

“We wanted it to be a real fireplace, functioning on its own,” says Jack, “as well as a display area.”

Stone by Stone

Pat and Anna Roche’s house in Eagle Harbor is a new home that sits on the same site as the original home built by Pat’s grandfather. When the Roches demolished the original home, they knew they wanted to keep at least one part of it – the fireplace.

“But when we examined the fireplace,” says Pat, “we discovered that it was sitting on a pile of rocks. It had no foundation at all. And that was not going to work.”

Still, the Roches were determined to keep the fireplace. They considered it something of an heirloom.

It was built with stones from the Copper Falls Mine, where Pat’s great-grandfather had been a mine captain. The stones had been delivered to Pat’s grandfather, the mine captain’s son, in Eagle Harbor, specifically for building the fireplace.

Preserving that family heritage was important to both Pat and Anna.

The solution was time- consuming. The Roches had the fireplace disassembled, stone by stone.

They built a foundation in the new house, and then had the fireplace reassembled, stone by stone by stone.

“It’s not perfect,” admits Pat.

“We lost the original mantelpiece in the process, so the limestone one you see is new. But we’re glad we saved it, and it’s still, basically, the same fireplace, sitting in the same place. Only now it’s in a new home.”

And one warmer for the effort.

Freelance writer Lesley DuTemple still wades in Lake Superior and picks up rocks, but only ones that fit in her pocket.