In 1968, the French sculptor Dominique Imbert did something nobody else had done: he picked the fireplace up off the wall, hung it from the ceiling, and let it turn. The piece was the Gyrofocus — a circular hood of folded steel, suspended on a single column, pivoting a full 360 degrees over an open hearth. It was the first suspended fireplace in the world, and it pulled the entire idea of the hearth out of the chimney corner and into the middle of the room, where it had always wanted to be. Five and a half decades later, it is still in production, still unmistakable, still the original.

The Gyrofocus has been exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York, at the Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art, and at the National Centre of Contemporary Art in Grenoble. In 2009, in Italy's Pulchra competition, seventy-four thousand people voted it the most beautiful object in the world. In 2023 it picked up a German Design Award. It is, by a wide margin, the most awarded fireplace ever made — and it is one fireplace inside a much larger family of around twenty, the line that Imbert and his collaborators have been quietly extending ever since.

What runs through every piece in the Focus collection is the same act of authorship. These are fireplaces that have been drawn by a sculptor, not engineered for a wall cavity. Each model is built from three-millimetre steel — thicker than almost anything comparable on the market — shaped on custom wooden moulds rather than stamped, with the welds ground until they are invisible. They are designed to be seen from every side, lit and unlit, and to look like one continuous gesture. The Focus literature calls them kinetic art, and once you have stood in front of a Gyrofocus that has just been turned a quarter-circle to face the dining table, the phrase stops feeling like marketing.

The line carries three energy streams. Wood — the original, an open hearth visible across the whole width of the hood, the fire breathing without glass. Gas — for the same silhouettes, with realistic ceramic logs, controlled flame and no fuel to carry. And Holographik® — a recent third way, a three-dimensional flame projection over ceramic logs, with the sound of real wood and no flue at all, that lets a Focus live in a top-floor apartment or a hotel lobby where neither wood nor gas can reach. The Holographik has its own dedicated piece in the Collection; this page is about the wider family.

A Focus is not a fireplace you slot into a niche. It is a piece of sculpture that has to be installed with the room around it. The suspended models hang from the ceiling on a single column, with their own dedicated flue, and the structure above has to be ready to carry them — not every joist arrangement is, and quite often the answer is to work with your builder or your structural engineer to make sure it will be. A Heterofocus or a Paxfocus is simpler in principle, but each comes with a wood-burning flue run that needs to be planned with care. A gas Focus needs its line brought to the column. A Bubble lives outside, but it still wants the right pad.

That kind of installation is what we love at Maxwell, and it is the entire reason these pieces sit on our curated list. We sit down with you and the room first, and decide which Focus the room actually wants — suspended or grounded, wood or gas, big or compact. We plan the ceiling structure and the flue with our installers in the room, not from a catalogue. We coordinate with the framer, the drywaller and, where it is wanted, the structural engineer. We pull permits. We do the gas connection. We commission it and light it for you. We carry it under warranty afterwards. One team, one conversation, one project — from the first sketch to the moment the fire takes hold.

That is a Creative FireSpace™ by Maxwell. A Focus is one beautiful sculpture in steel; the FireSpace is the room around it — the ceiling structure, the column, the hearth, the way the air moves — that makes the sculpture feel like it was always meant to be there. The Focus collection is, perhaps, the line where that idea matters most.

Available across the full Focus catalogue — suspended, wall-mounted, free-standing and outdoor; wood, gas and Holographik®. Suspended installations require sufficient ceiling height (typically 9 ft / 274 cm and up). Tell us about the room and we will tell you which Focus is asking to live in it.