The Valor Portrait is the narrow one. Tall where most fireplaces are wide, slim enough to slip into a chimney breast or a stud wall, it was drawn for the rooms other fireplaces can't reach — the heritage cottage with the small original hearth, the condo with one usable wall, the renovation where the framing is already half-closed. If a space can take a fireplace at all, it can usually take a Portrait.

That versatility is the whole point. The Portrait goes in two ways. It can be dropped into an existing masonry fireplace as an insert — turning a draughty old brick chimney into a sealed, efficient heater — or built in fresh to wood framing and finished in drywall, tile, or stone, no masonry required. Its venting configurations are unusually forgiving, which in plain terms means we can route the vent where the building would otherwise say no.

Then there is the matter of the face. Valor offers the Portrait in a long line of interchangeable fronts — the clean, frameless Clearview for a modern room; the President™ and Senator for something more upright and formal; the Windsor Arch and Ledgeview for the older houses, the early-century Craftsman and the post-war bungalow that want a fireplace in period. Inside, you choose the fire itself: logs, coals, driftwood, or rocks, set against reflective glass, fluted black, or red brick. Few fireplaces let you tune both the frame and the flame this precisely.

Underneath the styling, it is first a heater. The Portrait runs on a modest gas input but throws a generous, controllable radiant warmth — heating the room and the people in it directly, the way the sun does, without a fan and without electricity. When the power goes out, it keeps working. A Valor Plus remote lets you set a temperature, program it around your day, and idle it down overnight. And the flame picture, for a unit this compact, is genuinely good — tall, layered, and slow.

We show the Valor Portrait in the Curated collection because it solves the problems that usually stall a fireplace project: too little space, the wrong kind of wall, a heritage room that needs a traditional front and a modern heater both. But a fireplace this adaptable is only as good as the hands that place it — and placing them is what Maxwell does best. Reading a difficult room, routing a vent where the building wants to say no, matching the right front to the right house: that is our craft, not an afterthought. It is, in the truest sense, a Creative FireSpace™ — where the constraint is real, and the answer still has to be beautiful.

Available as a zero-clearance build-in or a masonry insert, in natural gas or propane. The front, fuel bed, and venting are all specified to your room — let's look at the space together.