Element4 — How Many Sides of the Fire Do You Want to See?

Element4 is Dutch, and it shows. The company describes itself, disarmingly, as a no-nonsense fireplace manufacturer — which undersells the design and gets the temperament exactly right. There is very little romance in the way they talk about their work, and a considerable amount of it in the work itself.

Most manufacturers name a fireplace and then explain it. Element4 does the reverse. Modore. Bidore. Trisore. The prefix is a Latin numeral, and the numeral is the number of sides you see the fire from — one, two, three. The number that follows is simply the width in centimetres. A Modore 185 is a single-sided fire, 185 centimetres of it, and there is nothing else you need to be told.

It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. Once the naming makes sense, choosing stops being a matter of scrolling through models and becomes a far more useful conversation: how much of the fire do you want to see, and from where in the house do you want to see it?

Start at one. The Modore is the single-sided fire, drawn long and low, and it comes in four lengths — 100, 140, 185 and 240 centimetres. At the upper end it stops behaving like a fireplace and starts behaving like a horizon: a ribbon of flame set into a wall, with nothing framing it and nothing to distract from it. The Tenore and the frameless Lucius 140 work the same seam with different proportions.

Then two. The Bidore, at 100 or 140, is glazed on two faces, and this is the model that changes floor plans rather than walls. A see-through fire sits between two rooms — kitchen and sitting room, hallway and study — and gives both of them the same fire without giving either of them a wall. Element4 builds it around a double burner, so the flame runs the full depth of the firebox rather than hugging one face and disappointing whoever is standing on the other side. One of the two burners can be switched off on its own, which is a quietly clever piece of engineering: on a mild evening you keep the whole picture and halve the heat.

Three sides is the Trisore, at 100 or 140 — the bay. Glass on the front and on both returns, so the fire steps forward out of the wall and can be seen from an armchair placed almost anywhere in the room. It is the configuration people reach for when the fireplace has to serve an open-plan space that was never laid out around a hearth in the first place, which describes a great many of the homes we work in.

And then Element4 does something more interesting than adding a fourth model. It stops naming by number and starts offering the same fire in every arrangement at once.

The Summum is one firebox offered six ways. The suffix is the configuration: F for front, C for corner, 3S for three-sided, T for tunnel, RD for room divider and 4/S for four-sided. Four sizes — 70, 100, 140 and 190 — and the shape is chosen last, after the room has told you what it needs. A Summum 140 will run at up to roughly 81,000 BTU on natural gas at 90 percent efficiency, which is a serious appliance behind a very quiet piece of design.

The 4/S is the one that stops people. Glass on four faces, standing free, a column of fire you can walk all the way around and see through from any angle in the room. There is no wall involved in the composition at all — the fireplace is the architecture.

The Sky takes the same thought and stands it upright. Where the Summum is horizontal, the Sky is a tall portrait window of flame — small, medium, large or square, as a front, a tunnel or a room divider — and set into a pier or a spine wall it reads less like an appliance than like a slot cut through the house to let the fire show. The Large Roomdivider will deliver 15,000 to 49,000 BTU at 89 percent efficiency, with optional LED lighting beneath the log bed for the hours when the fire is off and the shape still has to earn its place.

Below all of that sit the Cupido 50 and 70, compact inserts for an existing opening, and beside it the Ovation — the free-standing stove we wrote about at length in August, the oldest silhouette in the collection rebuilt as a sealed direct-vent gas fire.

What runs through every one of them is the same burner. Element4’s Real Flame Burner lifts the flame between and around true-to-nature cleaved wood logs rather than sending it up from a row of ports behind them, and the difference is most obvious at the setting where gas fires usually give themselves away: turned right down. A low fire on a mild evening is the setting most people actually live with, and an Element4 is engineered to still look like something on a cold night’s wood fire when it is barely running. Log beds can be swapped for grey or white stones or a darker log set; rear walls come in black steel as standard, or black reflective glass.

The rest is the Dutch pragmatism reasserting itself. A remote control is standard, as is the Invisimesh safety screen — a mesh fine enough that you stop seeing it within a minute of sitting down. The optional ProControl wifi kit brings the fire onto a phone, and it will connect to home automation or to a plain wall switch instead, if that is more your temperament. The fireboxes are built to a minimum installation depth, so they can be set into walls that would refuse a conventional firebox.

Which brings us to the option that matters most, and gets the least attention. Element4 offers a Powerfan: powered venting that lets the flue travel considerably further, and turn considerably more corners, than a natural draught will tolerate. On paper it is a line item. In practice it is the reason a fire can go on an interior wall, in a peninsula between two rooms, or in the middle of the floor with no wall behind it at all — the reason a Bidore, a Summum 4/S or a Sky Roomdivider is a real option rather than a photograph of somebody else’s house.

That freedom is only worth what the installation makes of it. A vent run has to be drawn before the framing goes up, not discovered afterward; a four-sided fire has to be squared to the room and set at the right height, because a column of glass is unforgiving about both; and the whole thing has to satisfy an inspector. This is precisely the work Maxwell Fireplace does in-house — helping you choose the model, the finish and the firebed, planning the vent route, framing, pulling the permits, installing, and planning the surround with the trades who finish it — yours or ours — so it looks like it grew there.