Designer Fireplace Installation Guide: Placement, Safety and Space Planning

A feature wall installation positions the fireplace as the room’s primary visual anchor. This is the most common residential and commercial application because it resolves the focal hierarchy question cleanly: everything else in the room refers back to the fire. The placement decision then becomes about axis, height and proportion rather than location.

For residential rooms, the fireplace typically sits on the wall opposite the main entry or on the wall a primary seating arrangement faces. In hotel lobbies and commercial reception spaces, it commonly anchors the wall that guests see immediately on entry, functioning as both a wayfinding device and a first-impression set-piece. The Pendry Manhattan West hotel demonstrates this at scale: GACHOT designed the lobby around a monumental limestone fireplace wall that functions as the primary navigational reference for the entire ground floor.

Structural requirements are minimal. The wall must be or be lined with non-combustible material within the clearance envelope. EcoSmart Fire’s wall-mounted and recessed burners are designed to be set into steel, concrete, brick and stone substrates, and a builder or joiner can create the correct aperture using standard construction methods without specialist trades. There is no flue to coordinate, no gas connection to route and no structural penetration to engineer.

A double-sided or see-through fireplace creates a permeable boundary between two areas of a floor plate. The fire is visible from both sides, and the flame provides a dynamic visual connection rather than a hard separation. This configuration suits open-plan residential layouts, hotel lobby-to-bar transitions, and any application where the designer wants to zone space without closing it.

The installation consideration specific to this format is that both zones on either side of the divider contribute to the ventilation volume calculation, and the clearance envelope must be honoured on both faces. Because the burner is set into a structure rather than against a wall, the surrounding joinery or partition must be fully non-combustible within the clearance distance on each side.

EcoSmart Fire offers the Flex series and the Stainless Steel See-Through burners specifically for this configuration, and both are designed to be built into custom joinery or structural partitions by a fabricator.

Outdoor installation removes the indoor ventilation constraint entirely, since the combustion volume is effectively unlimited, but it introduces a different set of considerations. The unit must be rated for outdoor use by the manufacturer, because the burner, fuel tray and finish materials must tolerate moisture, UV exposure and temperature variation. Not all EcoSmart Fire models carry an outdoor rating; outdoor-rated models include the Mello, T-Lite 3, T-Lite 8, Pop 3L, Pop 3T, Pop 8L and Pop 8T.

Wind management is the primary operational concern. A flame in an exposed position will flicker, gutter or extinguish in wind above the manufacturer’s stated tolerance. Most outdoor installations benefit from a degree of structural wind protection, provided by walls, balustrades, screens or overhead cover. Clearance above the flame is greater outdoors than indoors because there is no ceiling to act as a thermal boundary, and the manufacturer’s overhead clearance figure should be applied to any roof, pergola or overhead structure.

Courtyard, terrace and garden-room installations commonly integrate the fireplace into hardscape as a permanent element. The Dezeen outdoor fireplaces lookbook documents a range of examples, including an ethanol fire set into a stone courtyard surround, where the permanence and material continuity of the installation reads as a considered landscape architecture decision rather than a portable accent.

The clearance specification for each EcoSmart Fire burner is published on its product data sheet, and that document is the authority for the installation. The figures in the summary table above are representative ranges; the actual numbers vary by burner output, format and configuration. In every case, the product data sheet takes precedence over any generic guidance.

The most critical clearance is above the flame. Bioethanol burns at high temperature, and a ceiling or overhead structure within the clearance envelope will accumulate heat, which can discolour, warp or ignite combustible materials. Low ceilings require a burner with a lower thermal output to maintain the required overhead clearance. Choosing the burner before finalising the ceiling height, or conversely designing the ceiling height around the burner, prevents this constraint from becoming a retrofit problem.

Walls and surfaces within the side and rear clearance zone must be non-combustible: steel, concrete, brick or natural stone are appropriate. Combustible materials, including timber veneers used as feature-wall accents, must sit outside the clearance distance rather than within it. In practice, most built-in installations resolve this by lining the immediate surround in a non-combustible material such as stone cladding or rendered masonry, with any combustible finish elements stopping at the clearance boundary.

The front clearance, between the open flame face and the nearest seating, soft furnishing or traffic path, is both a safety requirement and a comfort consideration. The minimum published by EcoSmart Fire for most residential burners is 500 mm, though larger, higher-output units require a greater distance. A sofa or chair placed inside this boundary is both a fire hazard and likely to be uncomfortable during prolonged use, because radiant heat increases significantly as distance decreases.

Traffic paths need to be planned around the clearance zone as well as around the physical unit. People moving through a space should not regularly pass within the clearance boundary of an operating fireplace. In open-plan layouts this is usually straightforward, but in tighter commercial spaces such as restaurant dining rooms or hotel corridors, the route from the seating zone to an adjacent area should not cross the clearance envelope.

Furniture arrangement should treat the clearance zone as a fixed exclusion boundary during the planning phase. The position of sofas, coffee tables, rugs and other soft furnishings should be resolved after the clearance zone is marked out, not before, so that the zone is not compromised as the room is furnished.

A bioethanol flame consumes oxygen from the room air and produces water vapour, carbon dioxide and small amounts of nitrogen dioxide as combustion by-products. In a well-ventilated room these by-products disperse without issue, but in a confined space below the minimum room volume for the chosen burner, they accumulate and degrade air quality.

Research by Vicente et al. published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials demonstrates that bioethanol fireplaces operating under minimal ventilation conditions produce measurable elevations in CO and NO2, confirming that the ventilation requirement is a genuine safety parameter rather than a precautionary guideline. The minimum room volume for each burner is published by EcoSmart Fire on the product data sheet and must be verified before the burner is specified for a given space.

Open-plan spaces typically satisfy the ventilation requirement because adjacent areas contribute to the effective room volume provided air can circulate freely between them. The calculation should use the volume of the zone that the fireplace directly occupies and any directly connected areas with open circulation. Closed rooms, such as bedrooms and home offices, almost always fall below the minimum for anything other than a very small decorative burner, and the guidance is generally to avoid operating a bioethanol fireplace in a closed room at all unless the room volume comfortably exceeds the minimum and the space is ventilated during operation.

The fireplace should be large enough to read as the room’s focal element from the primary viewing position, which is usually the main seating arrangement. For a standard residential room with a 2.4–2.7 m ceiling, a burner in the 600–1200 mm width range typically achieves this. Taller volumes require correspondingly larger units: SCP Redmond’s lobby renovation under a 13-foot ceiling required a lava rock fireplace scaled to match the volume, so that the fire did not appear visually marooned in the lower portion of the space.

Viewing height matters as much as width. A floor-level fireplace is experienced differently from one set at hearth height (typically 300–450 mm from floor level) or at eye level when seated (typically 400–500 mm from floor to burner centre). The convention in residential settings is hearth height, which places the flame in the peripheral vision of a seated person and creates the association with a traditional fireplace without requiring the formal surround. Higher placements are more common in commercial applications, where the fire needs to read at standing eye level in a lobby or bar setting.

A built-in or recessed fireplace almost always sits within a joinery or architectural surround, and the relationship between the burner and its surround determines how well the installation reads as a resolved piece of architecture rather than an appliance dropped into a wall. The most successful installations treat the fireplace as a compositional element within a larger wall arrangement, where the burner, the surround, the storage, the shelving and any flanking elements are designed as a single piece.

The key practical constraint is that the joinery within the clearance envelope must be made from or lined with non-combustible material, and the transition from non-combustible to combustible material must occur outside the clearance boundary. This is not difficult to achieve in a custom joinery design, but it requires that the joiner or cabinet maker is briefed on the clearance requirements before the joinery is detailed, rather than after.

Faraway Martha’s Vineyard, redesigned by Workshop/APD, demonstrates integration at a larger scale: a transformed double-height interior uses the fireplace as a proportioning device for the whole room, where the scale of the surround and the height of the fire within the space establish the datum from which the rest of the interior is composed.

A freestanding EcoSmart Fire unit is a finished product. It arrives ready to use, is positioned on a stable non-combustible surface, and begins operating immediately once loaded with fuel. There is no aperture to create, no lining to prepare, and no specialist trade involved in the placement. The clearance zone is established around the unit in its chosen location, and provided the floor surface is non-combustible or a compliant mat is used, the installation is complete.

This format is appropriate for any situation where permanence is undesirable or building work is not permitted. It is also the fastest path from specification to operation, making it the preferred format for staged interiors, events and spaces where the fire is a seasonal or occasional element rather than a permanent architectural feature.

A built-in or recessed EcoSmart Fire insert is integrated into the building structure. The installer, typically a builder, joiner or fabricator, creates an aperture of the required dimensions in the wall, floor or ceiling, lines the interior of the aperture with non-combustible material within the clearance envelope, and sets the burner into the prepared recess. The surrounding joinery or architectural finish is then built around the installed burner.

The EcoSmart Fire Flex series is specifically designed for this type of installation, with modular burner units that can be configured as single-sided, double-sided, corner or three-sided installations within a custom-built surround. The Flex’s modular design allows it to be scaled to the aperture rather than requiring the aperture to be built around a fixed product dimension, which gives designers more control over the final proportions of the installation.

The key installation step that is sometimes overlooked in built-in applications is the fuel access point. The burner tray must be accessible for refuelling, which means the design of the surround must incorporate an access point that is reachable by the user without requiring them to reach across or around the flame. Most EcoSmart Fire built-in burners have a front-loading fuel tray, but this should be confirmed on the product data sheet before the surround design is finalised.

Many residential renovation and heritage property projects involve an existing fireplace opening, typically a former solid-fuel or gas fireplace with a redundant flue. A ventless bioethanol insert is frequently the most practical solution for reinstating a live flame in these openings, because there is no gas connection to run, no flue to reinstate and no requirement for the opening to be structurally modified beyond what is needed to accept the burner.

The existing flue must be blocked and sealed before the bioethanol burner is installed, to prevent down-draughts from disturbing the flame and to ensure the room volume calculation is not compromised by air movement through the flue. This is standard masonry work and is typically done by a builder or stonemason. Once the flue is blocked, the opening is lined with non-combustible material to the product’s specification, and the burner is fitted into the prepared recess.

EcoSmart Fire’s Insert and Flex series are the models most commonly used in retrofit applications, because their burner dimensions are designed to fit within the proportions of a standard fireplace opening. The specifier should confirm the opening dimensions against the product dimensions at the specification stage, and allow for the lining thickness when calculating the available aperture.