Tile Stoves: European High Art Meets American High Tech
Preservation Green values protecting historic legacies. The hearth is the site of anthropological and architectural tradition.
Fire seems always to have held a powerful attraction for man. Fire is necessary for warmth and cooking. Open hearths and stoves for living ultimately advanced into oven stoves, as early as the 1300s. They are the first real heating appliances in history.
Swedish tile stoves improved efficiency by providing more heat-radiating surface. Today Sweden no longer manufactures stove tiles. The only "new" tile stoves available in Sweden are antiques salvaged from old buildings. These stoves may be a century and more old, but rebuilt they are good as new. Today's common Swedish tile stove is a five-channel model.
A hundred years ago not a pound of coal nor a cubic foot of illuminating gas had been burned. No iron stoves, no friction matches had been used, and all the cooking and warming in town or country were done by the aid of a fire kindled on the brick hearth or in the brick ovens… Only one room in the house was warm, unless some member of the family was ill, in all the rest the temperature was at zero during many nights of the winter. Think of all this in the Christmas time and be as kind to others as providence has been good to you.
From the Jefferson City (Mo.) State Journal, January 1877
Explore our projects featuring these traditional stoves.
West Strand
Mill Street
West Strand Cottage