Private Residence, Canmore, Alberta
“It’s very easy to work with,” says Browning. “The colors and the grain come out in it. I wanted to incorporate the cleft side with the grain so I could get a contrast of color and texture, mainly in sizes.”
The quarry extracts a variety of stone shapes, from flagstones to cut stone to boulders and crushed material. Much of it is cut from a 4” bed in different sizes from 1”-6”.
“I was steering mainly toward the blacks and the grays, because that was the type of style they wanted,” Browning says. “I just tried to get my shapes and sizes together by color. One of the biggest challenges was consistency in the tone. We were pulling them off pallets and that was the challenging part.”
However, Browning adds that he didn’t lay out the four fireplaces – in the dining room and great room at one end of the home, and in the two master bedrooms at the other – ahead of time, opting to select stones as each fireplace went up.
“We tried to plan ahead,” he says. “We’d try to keep it balanced. Because of the tapered sides, we were mainly focusing on the modernism of the level horizontal lines, trying to tie everything together and have true corners, level and plumb.”
Although the stone tends to break at right angles, to add visual interest with some pieces, Browning and his two helpers weren’t afraid to take a hammer and chisel to some pieces to create 45° angles. The mason says that, with those pieces, he was trying to blend in a little of the stone’s past with the more modern design he was creating for the Renauds.
“There have been quite a few skilled tradesmen who have worked in the valley,” he says. “When you walk down the streets in Banff, you see all styles. I was trying to pay tribute to those and the traditional with the stone, while not creating something that really stands out. I wanted these to be really timeless.”
Particularly in the great room, where the fireplace soars into the ceiling almost two stories high, Browning says he also consciously incorporated some larger stone pieces to help provide some scale to the fireplace.
“We tried not to be greedy and put in strictly large pieces,” he says. “We’d almost always have to rough up the faces a bit to make them look more natural, which we did with a guillotine. Then, we’d place the large ones and fill in around them. I’d try to keep it large over small.”
Because of the generally parallel lines of the ashlar design, Browning says installing the timber mantles in the fireplaces was not a problem. He calls their presence within Rundlestone, “simple but discrete.”
For the fireplaces and the exterior chimneys he utilized a 50/50 mixture of Type S masonry cement and Portland cement. Because of the need to work around the other trades, he estimates each fireplace took about 10 working days to complete.