The Flame Game

There's nothing that says "home for the holidays" like a fire in a hearth. Yet fireplaces have been relatively rare in Florida homes since the advent of reliable central heat.

Generations of Florida children have hung their Christmas stockings on the backs of kitchen chairs and gone to bed worrying about how Santa was going to get in.

Now, thanks to advances in technology, it's never been easier or cheaper to install a fireplace in either a new or existing home—although some of them, particularly those not requiring chimneys, wouldn't solve the Jolly Old Elf's access problem.

About $2,000 will buy you a nice gas fireplace with realistic-looking logs. An electric fireplace that looks more realistic than ever and requires no installation can cost even less. Consumers are responding by buying fireplaces at record rates.

Fireplace Central in St. Petersburg recently shut down the iron forge part of its business to concentrate only on fireplaces, says Candice Stutler, who inherited the 50-year-old business from her father.

"My dad started selling fireplaces in the 1960s," Stutler says. "I remember saying to him, 'Are you crazy? This is Florida.' And now fireplaces are our entire business. He was right."

Indeed, fireplaces have become so affordable and easy to install that some homeowners are putting in multiple units.

"That's something that has changed in the past few years," says Chad Hendrickson, product manager for Heat & Glo, a brand of Hearth & Homes Technologies, the world's largest fireplace manufacturer. "People put them in bedrooms, bathrooms, offices—every room in the house."

Not to mention the backyard.

"Down in Florida, you have a great market for that," Hendrickson says. "Outdoor kitchens, fireplaces, bonfires. It's really one of our biggest and fastest-growing categories."

Bob Estes, an owner of The Outdoor Kitchen Store in Tampa, says his business has grown to include outdoor fireplaces as well as grills.

"The outdoor kitchen has given way to the outdoor room, and that's where we insert the fireplace," Estes says. "We're not going out there just to grill—we're going out there to live."

As you would expect, fireplaces in usually toasty Florida are installed more for ambiance than heat.

"It used to be more of a functional product, but now it's more of a lifestyle product," says Hendrickson.

Manufacturers have responded by designing fireplace faces and cabinetry for every décor, from traditional to contemporary and everything in between.

There are elevated fireplaces for bedrooms, so the flames can be seen from the bed. There are tiny crèche-like fireplaces that emulate those found in European bed-and-breakfast inns.

And there's a new product, called The Cyclone, which creates a tornado of fire in a glass tube.

"We did that one just to show people that there are new ways to think about fireplaces," Hendrickson says. "They can think of fire as art."

But the biggest advance for more traditional gas and electric fireplaces is that they more closely resemble wood-burning ones. Indeed, some hand-painted ceramic gas logs look so much like the real thing that you have to examine them closely to tell them apart.

Some even sit on realistic beds of embers. "Some of the logs actually glow red," says Stutler.

But unlike wood-burning fireplaces, which require stoking and tending and cleaning, gas fireplaces can be turned on and off with the flick of a switch—and require no storage of wood or emptying of ashes.

The convenience factor has many homeowners with traditional wood-burning fireplaces converting them to burn gas instead. Some gas fireplaces don't even require a chimney or a vent to the outside. That makes installation even easier, since all that's required is connecting a gas line to the unit.

Logic suggests that a ventless fireplace could rob a home of oxygen. But such units come equipped with sensors that turn off the flame if the oxygen level in the room starts to fall.

Other gas fireplaces require venting, but instead of a traditional chimney, vent tubes about the size of dinner plates can easily be snaked through the wall or up through the attic to the roof.

Electric fireplaces are the easiest to install. They can be bought and used the same day-and they look a lot more realistic than they used to. And because they plug into a wall socket, they can be moved from room to room.

Stutler says she had a client with an electric fireplace who moved and took the fireplace with him—much to the new homebuyers' chagrin.

"They thought it was built-in," says Stutler.

Electric fireplaces are ideal for Florida, where the mercury seldom dips low enough to call for a very hot fire. When it's not particularly cold, an electric fireplace can be set on low. If you want more heat, you can turn up the dial up and activate a blower that circulates the heat into the room.

So if your home doesn't have a fireplace—or if it could use an additional one—check out the array of hassle-free, high-tech options now available. Fireplaces are hot—but they're also very cool.