Design for Life: How Green is My Hearth? An Efficient Fireplace

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Architect Kathy Rogers replaced an inefficient brick fireplace with a symbolic hearth, which displays candles or a sculpture.

I've been sitting and gazing into my fireplace, deep in thought, but things aren't what you might imagine. There's no overstuffed chair, no steaming mug of herbal tea. In fact, there's no fire. I'm staring at a carefully constructed concrete facsimile of logs with a gas line running in from the side.

I inherited this contraption with the house my family bought last spring. The fireplace was a selling point, as it is in most houses. There's something about that classic brick shape that draws people together and gives a room a focal point, something to gather around, to anchor the room.

Now I'm considering how I want to make this fireplace both a more efficient heat source and more enjoyable to my eye. I stare at these fake logs and wonder: Why would I rather burn real wood when I don't have my own forest and would have to buy firewood? Can I get sustainably forested logs? And what about the pollution from wood smoke? Aren't healthy forests and cleaner air good reasons to burn gas, not real logs?

Still, these concrete logs really bother me, and I think I know why. I like to create environments that reconnect people with nature, and gas flames licking at unmoved concrete logs just don't do that. I would rather have a genuine gas fire than a fake wood fire. Surely a sculptor could create a beautiful metal grill as a framework on which gas flames could dance and produce heat, light and delight without telling lies.

Besides, my history has taught me to love wood heat. For 11 years, I lived in a rural coastal area where almost everybody heated with wood. We had efficient, heat-producing woodstoves, placed centrally in our homes. We bought firewood from crusty old guys who knew how to manage their forests for sustainable yield; after all, they didn't want to go out of business. Every house I designed had a handy dry place for storing firewood within easy reach of an outside door.

I grew to love having a central hot spot to gather around, a place to warm my hands when I came in from outside. I loved that ongoing winter rhythm of semiconsciously monitoring the state of the burn and stoking the woodstove at intervals. I didn't realize how much I embodied that ritual until I moved back to the city and lived with a thermostatically controlled furnace that required nothing of me.