Living Room Fireplace
The living room fireplace sits just off the kitchen, so we used the same horizontal-grain teak to tie the two spaces together. IKEA cabinetry forms the base on either side, dressed up with custom door and drawer faces so it reads as built-in millwork rather than off-the-shelf boxes. Our shop made the floating walnut shelves to fit the wall exactly. On the left side, we dropped the cabinet height to roughly 17 inches and built it out as a bench seat. (The custom upholstered cushion hadn't arrived yet when we shot these photos.) The fireplace surround itself is large-format porcelain, two-foot by one-foot tiles in a warm taupe that picks up the wood tones without competing with them. This blend of IKEA cabinetry and shop-built millwork is something we do often as part of our custom IKEA installations.
Primary Bedroom Fireplace
This one is our favorite in the house. Picture curling up in that chair with a good book while the fire takes the chill off a cold Pacific Northwest evening. The mantel is one of the more technical pieces of millwork we built on this project. Our shop templated the wall and the inside corner so we could carry a continuous walnut shelf and mantel from the back wall all the way around the corner without breaking the line. The tile is a 6-by-48 plank in a weathered, driftwood-gray finish that runs floor to ceiling and wraps the corner along with the mantel. The before photo on the right shows what we started with: a small white textured surround floating on a green wall, with a TV awkwardly perched on a low cabinet to the side. Now the whole wall reads as one composition.
Den Fireplace
The den fireplace is the simplest of the three, and intentionally so. A wall of horizontal walnut planking gives the room warmth and grounds the space, and a live-edge walnut mantel is set off-center for an asymmetrical look that keeps it from feeling too composed. The white wave-textured tile around the firebox brings a little visual movement up close, so the eye has something to land on against all that dark wood. Custom fireplaces and feature walls like this fall under our beyond kitchen and bath services.
