It isn’t only antiques I am always on the look out for, but also the highest quality marbles to produce our reproduction marble fireplaces for when clients ask for specific colours outside of our standard statuary white.

When I was working out which fireplaces to install into my last interiors project at Hanbury Street, East London, I felt lucky to be able to draw from our large collection of antique and semi-precious coloured marbles and stones. I used some antique Derbyshire fossil that I had bought from the remains of a Vanburgh temple on the Castle Howard estate and used it to create an amended design of one of my favourite Lutyens fireplace designs. It is a perfect marriage and works beautifully in the room with its heavily fossilled material lending itself to the architectural nature of this Chimneypiece.

We have just finished a bespoke fire surround in grey Bardiglio marble for a client which was dictated by planning.

The house already had an antique Regency black marble Bullsesye fire surround and there was another fireplace that needed replacing. The client wanted us to create a bespoke piece that would reflect the antique Regency example but not match it. We suggested a grey Bardiglio that still had a beautiful depth but was lighter in feel and we drew up a bespoke fire surround designed with historic accuracy.

Where possible, we always endeavour to use date appropriate, or historically correct materials that relate to the period of the fire surround and its country of origin. Although it is becoming increasingly difficult to get antique materials, if we haven’t got it in stock, with our excellent sources of supply in England, Italy and the Continent, we can still get marbles and stones that were quarried hundreds of years ago. The Bardiglio was very popular in the early Eighteenth Century and had a revival in the Nineteenth Century, which lends itself well to many of our Georgian and Regency reproduction designs.

The St James Bolection in breche is a wonderful combination. The design is based on an early Eighteenth Century English fireplace model by James Gibbs and the Italian marble was favoured by the British in the early part of the Eighteenth Century. It’s use in this context is both historically accurate and again, works well with the architectural nature of the fire surround.

Many of our fire surrounds work perfectly in black marble as well, illustrated below with the Burford fireplace. Black marble has been used in chimneypiece design since the seventeenth century. It is steeped in tradition but perfect for any historic or contemporary interior. Our collection of large blocks of Black and Breche marble, makes the process of bespoke work so much easier and time scales are reduced.