Vesta, Roman domestic goddess

It is no coincidence that the Greek goddess Hestia and her Roman equivalent Vesta were associated not just with the hearth but with the home. From this domestic goddess came the knowledge of building houses and in the Roman and Greek home the hearth was far more than a functional fitting. It was a kind of eternal flame, guarded by, and dedicated to, the gods. The flames were never allowed to subside, unless ritually to be renewed again, and Vesta (and those famous vestal virgins) were the guardians.

Prometheus suffered terrible agonies (his liver being pecked out by a vulture for all eternity) to bring mankind fire and so the flames had to be treated with respect. And still should. The hearth and the fireplace are as close as the contemporary secular dwelling comes to a shrine. The flames are contained in a kind of aedicule, a miniature structure within which they dwell that is a simulacrum of the house itself. The notion that the fireplace forms the “focus” of the domestic interior has passed into estate agency and interior design cliché yet it is far more profound in its own way than we might realise. The Greek word for hearth is, in fact, focus. And that is firmly what it remains.

The first household fires were freestanding, situated in a pit or a pot at the heart of the dwelling. The smoke they generated rose up through an oculus in the roof (oculus is literally an eye to the sky). The mysterious element of fire was thus allowed to commune between the heavens and the earth, a memory of Prometheus’s act of generosity.

The Greek “focus” would have burnt in a shallow bowl, appearing as a kind of ritual offering served up in a dish, the blood of a slaughtered animal perhaps. The eternal flames that still burn in memorials around the world still use this same architectural language and, more recently, the arrival of minimalist fireplaces has seen the return of the firebowl as a sculptural object. That idea of a movable brazier of some sort persisted for thousands of years.

Towards the end of the 12th century, though, the invention of the chimney radically changed the nature of the dwelling and the place of the fire within it. The chimneypiece became the literal focus of the great halls of the medieval era, works of architecture in their own right. Set into the deep stone walls, an arch above them, they became a kind of counterpoint to the windows, a view to a different, more ethereal world of light and heat. The decoration of their surrounds emphasised the centrality and importance of the fire to life. This was the invention that separated men from beasts, which made us human.

The hood above the hearth, in particular, became more and more ornamented, bearing coats of arms and elaborate carvings. In a big hall the heat was quickly dissipated so, in acknowledgement of the centrality of the fire as the most desirable place in the dwelling, the inglenook emerged – in effect a room within a room. It reached its apotheosis in the British arts and crafts era when it became the image of a nostalgic, intimate domesticity, a place to which to retreat with a book and toasted crumpets. In the sublime work of MH Baillie Scott, Edwin Lutyens, WR Lethaby, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and others (and also of Adolf Loos in ­Austria and the American arts and crafts architects) the inglenook became the defining motif of an architecture that was paradoxically at once historicising and nostalgic and revelling in its English folk­siness while also being a spur for the ascetic and international modern movement.

The rise of modernism, however, and its obsessions with technology and efficiency, disposed of the fireplace as a redundant technology, discarding it in favour of radiators or underfloor heating. Yet the fireplace survived in the suburbs. It remained central to the idea of home and the housebuilders appreciated this – they were, after all, selling dreams of domesticity. In the 1930s the mantelpiece gave way to a tiled, art deco surround, then to a gas heater fixed to the wall (perhaps with fake flames) and topped with a mantelpiece. That in turn was replaced by do-it-yourself reproduction Victorian fireplaces, then by restored or reclaimed originals. The idea of the fireplace as architectural focus was, in time, reinvented as an essential part of every dwelling.

Its appeal is obvious. The German observer Hermann Muthesius wrote in his study of the burgeoning arts and crafts architecture, Das Englische Haus (1904): “To an Englishman the idea of a room without a fireplace is quite simply unthinkable ... the fireplace is the domestic altar before which daily and hourly he sacrifices to the household gods.”

The fireplace remains our domestic altar. Its archetype was dedicated to Vesta but the later elaborate overmantels that supported clocks and urns now house anything from family photos or postcards from loved ones to tourist souvenirs and gewgaws and, perhaps most revealingly, large mirrors that reflect back the scenes of our everyday lives. Like the massed fetishes Freud collected on his desk, these are symbols of a desire for meaning. They are our contemporary idols, representations of self, family, travel and the vague remnants of a once decorative art.

The fireplace also becomes the site of celebration and ritual. Festive cards appear atop them, with candles, garlands, holly, invitations and Christmas stockings. In their celebration of fire and the hearth they become the residing place of domestic Christmas. Even Santa Claus himself, the jolly spirit of midwinter and contemporary Dionysian plenty, emerges from the chimney.

In this way the fireplace represents a liminal zone, a place of communication with another world. When René Magritte painted a suburban fireplace in “Time Transfixed”, he pictured a steam train emerging from it, its smoke rising back up the chimney. It exquisitely demonstrates the dreamlike strangeness of this realm of fire, air and darkness.

For although the fireplace is the symbol of family and domesticity, it is far from unambiguous. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, the symbol of his childhood and anything that was meaningful to him, is burnt in the fireplace while hangers-on attempt to decipher those mysterious, whispered final words. Love letters are ritually tossed into the flames as lovers attempt to cleanse themselves of romantic misjudgments or to destroy incriminating words. In the film The Devil’s Advocate (1997), the huge fireplace becomes a (slightly obvious) cipher for hell itself. Hitchcock’s birds fly out of the fireplace in a representation of terrifying disruption, Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) casts her panties into the fireplace flames to discard, at least momentarily, her bourgeois conformity. The symbol of domesticity is also a place of turmoil and dreams, of passion and of the uncanny.

This is why the surviving fireplaces in older properties, the “original features”, have become so desirable. For the Romans the hearth represented the soul of the house and in our collective memory that meaning lives on. Surrounded by its domestic altar, the dark, smoke-blackened heart of the hearth remains the place where our domestic gods reside.