Ortal makes the kind of fire you design a room around. Engineered in a way few fireplaces are, its fireboxes read less like an appliance hung on a wall than an opening cut into one — a wide, uninterrupted plane of flame behind a single clean sheet of glass. The view is the point. A Front Facing 44H opens nearly forty-four inches across and twenty-two high; the larger frames run wider still. It is a landscape of fire, not a porthole.

And the fire inside it is genuinely good — tall, full, and even across the whole width, with no cold corners and no gaps. You choose the bed it burns over: realistic split logs, smooth river pebbles, or crushed glass, set against a black reflective interior that mirrors the flame and gives it depth. Lit low on a quiet evening or run hard on a cold night, it holds its picture.

What lets you build that fire into the heart of a room is the way Ortal handles its heat. Its Passive Cool Wall Technology draws the convective heat up and releases it into the room before it can collect behind the wall — continuously, with no fan, no extra wiring, and no background hum. The wall directly above the glass stays remarkably cool, which is why you can do the thing most fireplaces forbid: hang a television, or art, or simply finish in a material that would otherwise scorch, right above the fire. Heat where you want it; a cool, clean wall where you don't.

The second piece of engineering is the one that decides where a fireplace can go at all. Conventional direct-vent fireplaces have to sit near an outside wall — the flue can only run so far. Ortal's Power Vent system changes the math entirely. A fan-assisted vent moves the exhaust as far as 165 feet from the firebox, through long runs, around as many as twelve bends, even downhill. That means the fire can live on an interior wall, in the centre of a floor plan, in the room that has the view rather than the room that happens to have the chimney. For the homes we work in — where the best wall and the easy-to-vent wall are rarely the same wall — this is the major factor. It is the difference between where a fire is allowed and where you actually want it.

Ortal gives us an extraordinary amount to work with — a wall of fire, a cool surface above it, and the freedom to put it almost anywhere. Turning that freedom into a finished room — siting the firebox, planning the vent run, detailing the surround so the engineering disappears and only the fire remains — is exactly what Maxwell does. It is, at full scale, a Creative FireSpace™.

Available in many sizes and configurations — front-facing, corner, three-sided, see-through, and island — in natural gas or propane. Cool Wall and Power Vent options are specified to your room, so let's plan it together.