Some relationships are measured in transactions. The best ones are measured in years. For more than a decade — since 2014 — we have carried, installed, and quietly championed the work of Stûv, the Belgian firemaker whose designs have become some of the most recognizable shapes in our showroom. This September, that long partnership steps into the light at the Interior Design Show Vancouver.
It feels like the right moment to say plainly what a relationship like this actually means, because it is easy to underestimate. A brand does not arrive in a market fully formed. Someone has to believe in it early, put it on the floor, learn its details, install it well enough that the next client walks in already convinced. Over the past ten-plus years, that is the work we have done alongside Stûv here — introducing these fireplaces to homeowners, architects, and designers one considered project at a time, and helping build a name that now carries real weight in the room.
Interior Design Show Vancouver
September 24–27, 2026 · Vancouver Convention Centre
Who Stûv Is
Founded in Belgium in 1983, Stûv built its reputation on a simple, almost stubborn idea: that a fire should be beautifully made, endlessly adjustable, and honest about what it is. Their designs are engineering dressed as sculpture — pivoting fireboxes that turn to face the room or close for a clean burn, wood and gas hearths reduced to their essential geometry, cladding options that let a single unit read as rustic stone in one home and gallery-minimal in the next. Names like the Stûv 16, the Stûv 21, and the Stûv 30 are not model numbers to the people who own them; they are the reason a room finally feels finished.
There is one detail here worth pausing on, because it matters more than most buyers realize. While every Stûv is designed in Belgium, the fireplaces sold across North America are now built in Quebec — in the Montreal area — where they have been manufactured and certified to North American safety and heating standards since 2007. That means the units we install are engineered with old-world sensibility but made close to home: adapted for our codes, our climate, and our homes, and backed by parts and support that don't have to cross an ocean to reach you. For a homeowner, that combination of European design and North American manufacturing is quietly one of the most reassuring things about the brand.
What drew us to Stûv in the first place, and what has kept us close ever since, is the same instinct that guides our own work: the conviction that a fireplace is an architectural decision, not an appliance dropped into a wall. Stûv designs for freedom — see-through configurations, linear widths, freestanding forms — and freedom in fireplace design only pays off when the placement, the venting, and the surround are handled with equal care.
What We Built Together
Branding is a word that gets used loosely, so here is what it has actually looked like between Maxwel and Stûv. It looked like giving these fireplaces pride of place in the showroom, where a client can stand in front of a lit Stûv 16 and understand in ten seconds what a photograph could never explain. It looked like our installers learning the particulars of each firebox — the venting runs, the clearances, the cladding sequences — so that the finished result honours the design rather than fighting it. It looked like recommending the right Stûv for the right home, honestly, even when a simpler unit would have been the easier sell.
Over a decade, that steady work compounds. The clients who chose a Stûv early became the referrals who brought the next ones. Designers who saw one installed well began to specify them by name. That is how a brand grows in a market — not through a single campaign, but through years of being represented properly. We are proud of the part we have played in that story, and prouder still that Stûv has trusted us to tell it here.
Find Stûv at IDS Vancouver
The Interior Design Show is North America's leading design gathering, drawing tens of thousands of architects, interior designers, makers, and design-minded homeowners to the Vancouver Convention Centre each fall. From September 24 to 27, 2026, it is exactly the right stage for fireplaces that were always meant to be seen as design objects first. If you are attending the show, we would love for you to spend time with Stûv there — to see the geometry in person, watch a firebox pivot, and imagine one of these hearths at the centre of your own space.
And as always, the conversation continues in our showroom, where the full range is lit, installed, and ready to be understood the way fire is best understood — up close.
Where Maxwell Comes In
A remarkable fireplace is only half the equation. The other half is everything that surrounds it — and that is the half we have spent decades perfecting. This is the heart of what we call a Creative FireSpace™ by Maxwell: not a unit pulled from a catalogue, but a considered environment where the fireplace, the surround, the sightlines, and the architecture all resolve into one deliberate whole.
When you bring a Stûv into your home through Maxwell, you are not just buying the fireplace. You are getting a team that helps you choose the right model, firebed, and finish for the space; plans the vent run; handles framing, permits, and in-house installation; and coordinates the finishing trades so the wall around the fire looks intentional rather than assembled. One team, one point of contact, from the first conversation to the final flame. It is exactly this end-to-end care that lets Stûv's design freedom — the pivoting fireboxes, the see-through openings, the anywhere placement — actually deliver in a real room rather than just in a brochure.
A decade in, our partnership with Stûv is not a milestone we are marking so much as a foundation we keep building on. IDS Vancouver is simply the moment we get to share it a little more widely. Creative FireSpaces™ have always been about making warmth feel inevitable in a room — and few makers have helped us do that as beautifully, for as long, as Stûv.
Planning a Stûv fireplace, or curious what one would look like in your home? Visit our showroom at 1380 Pemberton Ave, North Vancouver, or call us at 604-987-1293.