Sleek fire-pit styles ignite a new trend

Thanks to compact, gas-burning designs by the likes of local Solus Decor, urban dwellers can rekindle those campfire memories

You can trace our love of a crackling fire back to our caveman days, when our ancestor Homo erectus discovered it during the Early Stone Age.

And while we can’t seem to shake that instinctual attachment to a warm, glowing flame, fortunately we don’t have to go out foraging for wood to enjoy it anymore.

In fact, wood-burning fire pits are largely disallowed under bylaws in Vancouver and the surrounding areas due to pollution. But cleaner-burning natural-gas- or propane-fuelled fire pits, many of them in sleek new designs, have never been more popular in back yards or on condo roof terraces. And today’s more compact, aesthetically pleasing, and multifunctioning designs are just upping the appeal for city dwellers. An American Society of Landscape Architects survey that came out in February shows outdoor fire pits standing strong amid the top 10 consumer demands.

“It’s been a massive trend,” agrees Graham Carruthers, a sales representative at the showroom for Solus Decor, one of the local leaders in the new fire-pit designs. “The idea of sitting around a fire is part of our cultural Zeitgeist. People go to Whistler, they go camping, and they have a lot of memories of that.

“Also Vancouver likes to get cold at night when you’re outside entertaining.”

Cast and hand-finished in a new New Westminster headquarters (at 109 Braid Street, Building C) from fibre-reinforced concrete, Solus’s products are tested and certified to meet or exceed North American and European safety standards. The concrete and the lava or concrete

Counterclockwise from top: Maui Lounge Chair at Moe’s Home Collection; Scott Landon Antiques’ 1920s decorative garden sink; braided-rope pouf at Gild & Co.