Monday, October 29, 2012

Fireplace Mantel

Exactly what is a Fireplace Mantel?

Originally developed in medieval times, the fireplace mantel acted like a hood that will catch smoke. However, the fireplace mantel changed with time to incorporate the ornamental frame that surrounds a fireplace. Therefore, mantels give a decorating highlight to any room using a fireplace, designs which might or might not extend to the ceiling. Commonly known as as a mantelpiece or chimney-piece, the fireplace mantel has traditionally been a creative element of an area while also providing practical elements including protecting the nearby area from fire damage.



Mantels can be purchased in an array of designs. From Renaissance styles which include elaborate wood-carved extremes to modern styles that feature clean lines and contemporary materials, your mantel can reflect your own design choices, anything they may be. Because rooms were traditionally heated having an open, wood-burning fireplace whereas rooms today are heated with mechanized contained heating systems, such as a gas-burning fireplace, the styles and applying mantels have certainly changed. However, even though your mantel may serve an alternative function today in comparison to hundreds of years ago, it will continue to provide a focus to many different areas.



Today's fireplace mantels are often extensions of the architectural or design features of your house. Nevertheless, mantel manufacturers can develop a mantelpiece that reflects essentially any design period ever. You may choose to have a customized mantel, or a standard design, but always remember that mantel for the fireplaces can improve the appearance, ambiance, or overall kind of your home.




Without question, mantels have become an enclosed design focus. And provides a unique chance to elaborate on the kind of a space, fireplace mantels will also be important for expressing your personality. Fireplace mantels could be made out of marble, limestone, granite, as well as other woods depending on your choice. You may make use of mantel to state your artistic freedom since it is becoming more commonplace to possess a sculptor or artisan design a one-of-a-kind fireplace mantel for your residence.



Furthermore, mantels often feature more subtle elements of design for example capitals, mouldings, brackets, fruits, or vegetation for decoration. It could be clichéd, but it is not at all an overstatement to express how the sky is the limit when it comes to fireplace mantel design choices. You can easily pick a mantel that draws from Classic, Renaissance, Italian, French, American, or Victorian genres or choose a design that is totally for your own sense of style. You can even mix design genres.



So while a mantel may seem like a straightforward fireplace surrounding in which you display pictures and knickknacks, the reality is that a mantel will be the centerpiece of favor in your family area, bedroom, or family area. Indeed, your fireplace mantel can not only reflect your own personal design choices but the function and architecture of the room it inhabits.




Fireplace Mantel Styles - Form, Function, and style Through the Years

By John L Pham

The fireplace mantel is familiar to us all denoting home and luxury. Yet as universal because the fireplace mantel might appear, it's meant different things at different times in history- serving once not merely being a supply of heat, but as a method of cooking, with some fireplace mantels reaching an enormous width that can accommodate several cooks and roasting joint.


Pearl Mantels 120-48 Windsor 48-Inch Fireplace Mantel Surround, Unfinished

Fireplace mantel or simply just mantel, also known as fireplace surround, hood, or any other similar projection, usually ornamented, that surround the opening of your fireplace that directs smokes for the chimney flue originated from medieval times being a hood that projected over a grate capture the smoke. The term has evolved to include the ornamental framework, usually stone, round the fireplace, and can include elaborate designs extending to the ceiling, also known as over-mantels.

Mantel has become the typical term for your jambs, mantel shelf, and external accessories of your fireplace. For a lot of centuries, the mantel was one of the most ornamental and a lot artistic feature of your room, but as fireplaces have become smaller, and modern ways of heating happen to be introduced, its artistic with its practical significance has lessened.


Fireplace mantels of early days

Up to the twelfth century, fires were simply produced in the middle of a house by fires on the hearth with smoke vented out the lantern within the roof. As time proceeded, the location of fireplaces gone to live in the wall, incorporating chimneys to vent the smoke. This permitted the design of a really elaborate, rich, architectural center point for a grand room.

The initial known fireplace mantel is incorporated in the Kings House at Southampton, with Norman shafts within the joints carrying a segmental arch, that is caused by the first 50 % of the twelfth century. At a later time, in consequence of the greater width of the fireplace, flat or segmental arches were thrown across and designed with archivolt, sometimes joggled, with the thrust from the arch being resisted by bars of iron at the back.

In domestic work with the fourteenth century, the fireplace mantel was greatly increased in order to allow of the members of the family looking at both sides from the fire on the hearth, and in these cases great beams of timber were used to carry the hood; in such cases the fireplace am deeply recessed as to become externally a crucial architectural feature, as at Haddon Hall. The largest fireplace mantel existing is incorporated in the great hall from the Palais des Comtes at Poitiers, which can be nearly 30 feet wide, having two intermediate supports to transport the hood; the stone flues are carried up involving the tracery of the immense window above.

A brief history of carved mantels is a fundamental take into account a history of western art. Every element of European sculpture is visible on great mantels. Many of the historically noted sculptors in history i.e. Augustus St. Gaudens designed and carved magnificent mantels, most of which are available presented in the world's great museums. The same manner the facade of your building is distinguished by its design, proportion, and detail so it's with fine mantels. The eye to carved detail is what defines a great mantel.


Fireplace mantels today

As much as the late Twentieth century and also the invention of central-air heating systems, rooms were heated by an open or central fire. A modern fireplace mantel usually can serve as a component to boost the grandeur of an interior space rather than being a flames. However, modern fireplace have real fire inside them as the intense feeling of personal security that a real fire projects-with its leaping flames and warm, cozy light-can not be replaced or reproduced within rooms with artificial types of heating. Today, fireplace mantels of varying quality, materials and elegance are available worldwide. The fireplace mantels of today often incorporate the architecture of two or more periods or cultures.



Source for this article:
  • http://EzineArticles.com/7139549
  • http://EzineArticles.com/6569123


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