Antique fireplaces?

[LoveAngelGabriel]

After the brilliant help I got here with choosing flooring for our new house, I thought I'd see if by any chance anyoen could help me with the following:

Can anyone reccomend a good place to get an antique Edwardian fireplace - preferably in London as I'd like to e able to go to the warehouse / shop and have a look before buying anything.

Also - what do we all think about getting 'reproduction' antique firepaces rather than the real thing. Totally naff? Antique freplaces seem so expensive, but I would lie to keep some of the original features of the house...

I'm confused!

Many thanks

If you can get an original as unless a repro is very good they aways look 'wrong' ime.Look up salvage and reclamation yards online or in the yellow pages.Worth paying a bit more to get it professionally cleaned They look fantastic when they are done though.Good luck

I used Nostalgia in Stockport.

They are fantastic.
We have bought 2 from there albeit a few years ago now. The first was already 'cleaned' up so we knew what we were getting, for the second we were a bit more adventurous and chose a rusty old looking thing with gaps in places, but was so ornate and lovely. They have a huge warehouse full of rusty old ones that they somehow manage to refit and make them wonderful.

They have quite a good website which is worth checking out if you google nostalgia and fireplaces (Cant do all these fiddly link things !)

There's a specialist shop on the Holloway Road in North London, called something like The Better Hearth. We used them in our last house -- they did reproduction ones for us, and contrary to what other people have said, they didn't look like repro at all, they looked just like the original ones I'd been eyeing up in other local houses.

They were very knowledgeable about which details of the fireplace and grate would go with which kind of house.

The people who installed them were nice as well, which is a bonus.

I bought mine on ebay & then bought a pine victorian surround also from ebay, but from a different seller. Both are fab, but make sure you buy a complete fireplace as it can be difficult getting grates to fit.

Paid £400 for the fireplace & £60 for the surround.

We had a reproduction fitted,purely because we couldn't find an antique one to fit & within our budget.We also had concerns about having problems once it was fitted & the supplier blaming the builder & the builder blaming the supplier,IYKWIM.

Ours is black & burnished cast iron,very big as it is our major source of heat in the room & has a waxed pine suround & mantel.It was expensive,including fitting & a new hearth it was just over 2k.But it was worth every penny.Everyone who walks into the room stops in their tracks & says 'wow!'It has made a very plain room look completely different.

We went to Britains Heritage in Leicester,who did the whole lot for us.I can highly reccomend them.

We got ours from Blue Mantle Antiques on Old Kent Road - is that still around? We rooted around in rooms full of old cast iron until we found one with pretty original tiles intact, and they fitted it with a tidy repro. pine surround and slate hearth. It's quite an experience just to visit, and they do know their stuff. Make sure you go upstairs! I think an original piece adds so much to a house, especially one as badly mutilated in the 60's as ours was.

I did go to a place in Fulham that claimed to make new inserts to original moulds - but actually they were a lot more expensive.

Thank you once again people!

we got ours from a place called 'Just Fires' in Leytonstone. They do antique and repro, have loads of surrounds too and offer a fitting service. They also restored an old victorian grate that we had in the cellar for us (good if you find a cheap one on ebay or reclamation yard that needs a bit of work)