spotlight || glow
Hot Commodity Minnesotans warming up to outdoor fireplaces. |
by alyssa ford
A
from rustic to refined
Landscape architecture firm Keenan & Sveiven has designed dozens of stunning outdoor fireplaces across the Twin Cities metro. The firm often partners with Anchor Block, a century-old masonry company that makes its own tumbled pavers, aged stepping stones and retaining walls. Anchor Block employs more than 200 Minnesotans.
186 Artful Living
| Autumn 2011
Artful-LivingMag.com
s early autumn transitions into crisp football weather and then into first cool days of winter, Minnesotans begin a sad, annual exercise: to trudge out to the patio and pack up the lounge chairs and umbrellas, one final adieu to the warm season. But for a few lucky families, the al-fresco season is being stretched well beyond the confines of late spring and early autumn. What makes it possible is the hottest trend in the landscape design: full-fledged outdoor fireplaces. Made of bluestone, fieldstone, cultured stone or even plaster, outdoor fireplaces generate ample heat without the smoke and embers so common with fire rings or fire pits. Plus, outdoor fireplaces are viewed as true landscape improvements. According to the Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association, yard improvements pay back 100 to 200 percent at resale. In fact, the only home improvement that yields more return is a gallon of paint. For landscape architects, such as Kevin Keenan, principal at Keenan & Sveiven in Minnetonka, outdoor fireplaces are some of the most joyful applications to design because they can really do or be anything: a woodsy towering sculpture of stone or a minimalist element that seems to disappear behind the roar and crackle of a lit fire. Many homeowners commission outdoor fireplaces with entertaining in mind, a vision of sweatshirt-bundled friends and gooey s’mores dancing in their heads. But, Keenan says, he has discovered that more people end up using their outdoor fireplaces as a private spot, a warm retreat under the stars with a bottle of wine. “Simply put,” says Keenan, “when people have a warm place to go outside, they gravitate there without any occasion or reason at all.”