New fireplace surround

The fireplace in our music room has been sitting with ragged plaster, inappropriate brickwork, and no mantle since we "completed" remodeling four years ago. I finally got to building a new surround which is more compatible with the English Arts and Crafts theme we've tried to set with the house.

Here's where I started:
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I did a skimcoat of thinset over the brick and then set some handmade tile DW had acquired for the purpose:
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Side cases were frame and panel cherry with birdseye maple, made to match the rest of the trimwork I've done in the house:

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The most challenging part was doing an inlay in the mantle board above the firebox. We chose a design from Harvey Ellis, a designer who worked with Stickley. Inlays were cut from 1/16" thick veneers using either a jewelry saw and birdsmouth, or by setting up my Stewart-Macdonald Foredom tool micro-router upside down and using it to cut the pieces freehand. I made multiple copied of the pattern, glued it to the veneer to be cut as a pattern and another copy to the board that was being inlaid. I used a knive to cut through the pattern to make a sharp line I could cut to, as the paper fuzzed up while cutting, making it impossible to see the edge. I tried to cut to the inside of the line on the veneer and the outside of the line on the routed cavity, not always with perfect success :D. The inlays are bloodwood, wenge, maple, and yellowheart.

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Once they were glued in I planed the board down smooth and finished the installation.

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Nice to have that one ticked off the to-do list! It is far from perfect, were I to do more things like this I would invest in templates for cutting the inlays. Doing them freehand captures every little bobble. I talked to a guy about laser cutting them but was told it couldn't be done with 1/16" thick veneers. I'm not convinced that's true. Next up is installation of a round window that's going to require bending a circular cherry frame. Should be interesting.

Nicely done! Well planned & executed.

Very nice. Well thought out and executed.

Truly beautiful, Roger!

What a nice improvement, roger. It looks great !

It's nice and inviting, good inlay design and work. I'm thinking the art needs to be a little higher.

Wow, nicely done. Believe it or not, I can’t see a single flaw! Beautiful improvement.

Oh my, that is very, very nicely done. Patrick

Thanks all!

The most intimidating aspect of this was setting the handmade tiles, which were of uneven thickness and not all quite square. After getting a quote of $1800 from a pro I decided it was worth trying it myself. It turned out to not be nearly as hard in practice as I imagined it might be. We laid out the tiles on the floor and rearranged them until we had a distribution of color variations that we found pleasing.

Once into the project, and after the side cases were built, I found out that the floor was sloped, and the fireplace was level, but almost a half inch taller on one side than the other (oops!!). I found a couple of places to fudge an eighth inch up and down on each side to make it look the same on each side. The wall also has a 3/4" wave in it, but I figured that out in advance and made the cases to fit the wall and give me even reveals for the horizontal boards.