An Unbelievably Cozy Cottage Fireplace Makeover 

Melissa Oholendt (@oho_house on Instagram) has been the principal designer at Oho Interiors since 2019. Based out of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, Melissa finds joy in the challenge of creating spaces that hit the mark for her varied clientele. But in the peak of the pandemic, Melissa and her husband, Matt, found their dream home. Or, more accurately, the bones of what they knew could become their dream home.

“We found this house that had a ton of potential and needed a lot of work and love, and we decided to just do it,” Melissa says, laughing in recognition that with a worldwide pandemic raging, the timing was less than ideal. Now faced with the task of putting her design chops to the test for her own family, including Matt and their toddler daughter, Melissa rolled up her sleeves and started sketching.

Pandemic challenges aside, Melissa now faced converting a dated 1940s home in the far Twin Cities suburbs. And while issues like lumber shortages and a million limiting restrictions rang as true to her as everyone else, she faced them head on. With determination, a healthy dose of patience, and a keen eye for style, Melissa tackled the home.

One of the key features of the original house was found in the living room: a bold red wall behind a clunky, off-centered stove. While the idea of a fireplace appealed to the Oholendts on a deep level, the execution of this particular fire feature missed the mark by about a mile. “[A fireplace] was one of my dreams,” Melissa reflects. “I grew up with a gas fireplace, but in my married life we'd never had one. I knew there was such a great opportunity to have one here.”

That’s when Melissa crossed her fingers and put her wish out into the ether: to team up with Heat & Glo. To Melissa’s delight, Heat & Glo granted her wish, and the fun began. “[My contact] said, ‘Here are some fireplaces that I think fit, but go visit a Fireside Hearth & Home showroom and see what you’re drawn to in person,’” Melissa recalls. There in the showroom, visions abounded. “There’s so much variety, so [my contact] really encouraged exploring. From there, she let me run with the design portion of it.”

The Oholendts took stock of the different styles at the Fireside showroom, and looked for what spoke to them. Size was a major factor, with a sixteen-foot wall as their backdrop, scale was everything. Too small a fireplace would blend in with the built-ins to feel “too library-ish.” Not the look they were going for. “We needed something that would hold its own and feel as substantial as the built-ins we had planned. We weren’t concerned about having a unit that would heat up the room, we just wanted something that would fit the scale of the wall,” Melissa says.

The Phoenix TrueView indoor gas fireplace’s stately size, at approximately 51 by 74 inches, was right for the job. But the appeal ran deeper than that. “Not having glass in front was something I didn’t know I needed in my life,” Melissa laughs over yet another perk of the Phoenix’s unique design. The open gas fireplace has a large, glass-free view. When the built-in Bluetooth speaker loops the crackle of burning logs, as the Oholendts’ often do, it’s truly hard to believe that it isn’t a traditional wood-burning fireplace.

Of course, choosing the fireplace unit was one of the easier parts of the process. In an effort to save money, Melissa and Matt took demo into their own hands--a process she isn’t eager to repeat. They tore out the old stone wall, as well as the raised hearth, also built of stone and the chimney on the outside of their house. “It was probably the most labor-intensive part of the whole thing,” she says.

Once that part was done, though, it was simply a matter of framing in the fireplace (another step the couple tackled themselves), and being cleared for install. In the space of time between being cleared for installation and the actual fireplace installation, the drywall went up and the flooring went down. When Fireside came to install the venting and fireplace, the Oholendts could finally take a breath. “That piece was as painless as it could get,” Melissa remembers of installation.