Woodburner fireplace ideas: inspiration for design, decor and materials

In this article we’re going to round up some woodburner fireplace ideas to give you some inspiration as to how your stove might look in your room.

How a woodburner looks is likely to be a key factor when you’re deciding which stove to buy. (More on choosing which woodburner to buy here.) But the look of the entire fireplace is going to be just as important in determining how the room looks when the woodburner is installed.

Traditional woodburner fireplace ideas

If your room already has an open fireplace, the existing focal point is the obvious place to install a stove. After all, it wouldn’t make much sense to put the stove elsewhere if you’ve got a chimney breast ready for action.

There are two options available to you. The first is to open up the fireplace to give enough room to safely and legally install a woodburner. This gives you the opportunity to incorporate or enhance an existing hearth and surround or mantel. Equally, you could add a new hearth and mantel.

If a traditional fireplace surround isn’t right for you, you might consider adding a wooden mantel, which is among the most popular woodburner fireplace ideas. Here are a couple of examples of how that might look.

If you don’t want to open the fireplace up, a second option is to install an inset wood-burning stove. These are woodburners that are designed to slot straight into standard fireplace openings, like the example below.

Alternatively, you could close up the original fireplace opening and create another opening higher up the chimney breast. Stoves suitable for this option of recessing or insetting are variously called cassette stoves, built-in stoves and recessed stoves, as well as the term we used, inset stoves. That can help you to create an ultra-modern look, as featured in the example below.

As you can see from those handful of examples, there is also plenty of scope to play to the strengths of existing features or add new ones to create the look you want. Exposed brick, slate, stone, wood and tiles are some of the materials you can incorporate into your woodburner fireplace ideas.

This property picks up on the red brick left exposed by opening up the fireplace, then extends that into the room by using the same brick as a hearth. This use of existing materials and features makes for some interesting woodburner fireplace ideas in period homes.

On the other hand, you can blend the traditional and modern through your choice of tiles. This fireplace features some midcentury-inspired but very contemporary geometric tiles. Just make sure the tile you choose is suitable for use behind woodburners (some tiles will crack when exposed to the intense heat).

Woodburner fireplace ideas without a traditional fireplace

Installing a woodburner in a room that doesn’t have an existing fireplace brings with it some additional complications and some additional freedoms. While you don’t have the infrastructure of a chimney breast to work with, you can choose any spot in your room in which to create your new fireplace.

Other than the considerations around distances to combustible materials and other building regulations, the stove will normally need to be placed somewhere where a twin wall flue can be installed vertically through the building or near a wall that the flue can go out and then up the outside of the building.

Within those criteria, you could then choose to create something similar to a fireplace, albeit without the chimney breast, or create a freestanding feature. You can contrast the hearth with your floor, match it, or use a glass hearth to show off the floor itself.