ARTISANS: Some Like it Hot

 

On a wednesday in the middle of mud season, Stephen Bushway stops by a home in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, to inspect a masonry heater he completed a few months ago. Bushway is a mason, and these enclosed hearths, which soak up heat from a short, hot fire and radiate it over a period of many hours, have been his specialty for two decades. These particular clients found Bushway’s Deer Hill Masonry through word of mouth; they had lived in Sweden for five years, where masonry heaters have a long history and remain a common heating method.

 

Bushway, who is trained as a classical violinist and now moonlights as a professional fiddler, drove straight from Boston this morning after playing a last-minute gig the previous night. Nonetheless, he has thought to bring along a plastic bucket full of kindling, which seems to amuse homeowner Julie Westervelt. She and her husband have about two years’ worth of firewood left over from clearing the lot for their new house. Bushway, wearing a worn-in work shirt with a pair of glasses and pen in the breast pocket, explains a little sheepishly that he wasn’t sure if they’d have dry kindling or not. He views his projects as “functional art” and, indeed, the heater’s practicality is evident: the house is still plenty warm from the previous day’s fire.

 

Bushway, 60, has a beard, wild tufts of dark-gray hair, and a soft voice that contrasts with the imposing nature of many of his projects, which include traditional fireplaces and the occasional outdoor terrace or stone wall. The Westervelts’ hearth weighs somewhere between five and six tons and has a chimney that stretches twenty-four feet to the peaked ceiling. That’s large, but not unusually so by Bushway’s standards.

 

The Westervelts’ timber-frame house has an open floor plan, and the heater, made of brick and soapstone, divides a lounge area from a casual living room. Julie drew up the basic design for the hearth, but welcomed Bushway’s aesthetic input.

 

“It was nice to have somebody who can step back and say, ‘Well, this would be a nice arch effect here,’ or, ‘You could use these materials,’” Julie says. Bushway, however, is not prone to self-promotion. “I don’t want it to be my statement,” he demurs. “I want it to be their statement.” Julie, for example, likes the simple look of the nineteenth-century craftsman style, so Bushway designed the heater with straight, clean lines to match the house. Client input is important, both for practical reasons—he doesn’t want to waste his time and their money on something they may end up not liking—and also because, he says, “If people are engaged in the process … they have more of an appreciation of it.”

 

The history of masonry heaters stretches back hundreds of years in Europe, but their adoption in the United States is fairly recent—since the 1973 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo. They’re made of brick, stone, tile, or ceramics—Bushway sticks to the first two materials, as well as stucco—but their signature feature is long-lasting, radiant heat. They require less wood, don’t need stoking, and burn a very hot fire that consumes wood more cleanly than a wood stove or fireplace. (Bushway, as it turns out, is one of two Berkshirites certified by the Masonry Heater Association of North America, the industry’s chief trade group.)

 

Though their popularity has increased, masonry heaters are still considered rare, perhaps because of their high price: Bushway’s projects run between nine thousand and forty thousand dollars. Stone isn’t cheap, and design and execution take substantial time. The Westervelts’ heater, for example, consumed about two hundred and fifty hours of manpower, most of which Bushway completed on his own, although his son—fittingly named Mason—helped out during his winter break from Wahconah Regional High School. Bushway fits in about four big jobs a year, in addition to smaller repair projects.

Bushway got his start in masonry via his chimney cleaning business. After moving to the Berkshires permanently in the early 1980s and helping to found the Wild Oats Food Co-op (now Wild Oats Market) in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he was a manager for five years, he grew eager to work with his hands. He bought a friend’s chimney sweep business in Williamstown and found it was good work—lots of people had wood stoves, the result of the late-1970s energy crisis and a renewed live-off-the-land mentality.

 

Bushway joined the Massachusetts Chimney Sweep Guild, comprised of a new generation of chimney sweeps that Bushway’s friend, Judd Berg, a chimney sweep on Cape Cod, describes as young, progressive, and environmentally aware. Bushway fits in well. He has an interest in clean energy and the outdoors—he hiked part of the Appalachian Trail in the mid-1970s and taught for several winters at a cross-country ski area outside of Stamford, Vermont.

 

Bushway ended up serving as president of the chimney sweeps’ association in the mid-nineties. He also wrote a book focusing on safe and efficient wood-burning, The New Woodburner’s Handbook: A Guide to Safe, Healthy and Efficient Woodburning, published in 1992 by North Adams, Massachusetts-based Storey Publishing. Along the way, he patented a design for steel ridgehooks workmen use to mount scaffolding to a roof, an idea that came to him when he found himself trying to navigate the slippery slate roofs of the houses on Williamstown’s Southworth Street. He sells about a hundred and fifty sets of hooks a year.

 

Bushway eventually found himself doing a fair amount of chimney repair work. He took a liking to it, enrolled in a masonry class offered by the Chimney Sweep Guild at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, and ended up being one of the first people certified by the newly created Masonry Heater Association, then a fledging group of a few members living around the country. “Because it was such a small scene, and if you make a mistake it [might] cost a lot of money, it was very worthwhile for us to get together and share knowledge,” explains Norbert Senf, a Quebec-based mason who manufactures masonry heater kits that Bushway uses in about half his jobs. (He builds the rest from scratch.)

 

Bushway built his first masonry heater in 1989, in his own house. He deems the craftsmanship a bit rough compared to his other work, but it pleases him that he’s had a chance to refine his skills with every job since.

 

“Part of the thing that I like about this job is that the learning curve never flattens out,” he says, then laughs and corrects himself. “It’s flatter than it used to be, though.” Increasingly, Bushway builds masonry heaters rather than traditional fireplaces, although he spent six months building two massive fireplaces in a Williamstown house, which recently earned him the masonry industry’s most prestigious award: Project of the Year. Though Bushway doesn’t count the project among his most challenging, the judges, it seemed, were especially impressed by a thirteen-hundred-pound slab of lintel stone that Bushway used to frame the opening to the downstairs fireplace.

 

Bushway uses some stone from Goshen and Ashfield, Massachusetts, as well as granite from local quarries, but one of his favorite materials for benches and custom detailing is Brazilian soapstone, which has a silky texture and a special propensity to retain heat. For the Westervelts, avid skiers, he fashioned built-in soapstone benches similar to the ones he built at the Ski Notchview cross-country center in Windsor, Massachusetts. The benches emit a cozy stream of heat that feels like sitting on a stone wall on a sunny day. Julie, an early riser, likes to sit on them as she drinks her morning coffee and watches the sunrise. Last winter, her two daughters, ages six and eight, had taken to scampering down to the benches first thing in the morning and warming themselves while Julie prepared breakfast.

 

Other unusual features in the Westervelts’ hearth include a built-in, automated “woodwaiter” that brings wood up from the basement, and an oven. Julie is still getting the hang of the oven: a batch of muffins baked earlier today came out completely blackened, she tells Bushway. He nods sympathetically. Getting the right temperature and timing takes practice; it depends on when a fire was last burned and how much wood was used. He enjoys making granola in his heater’s oven; it comes out moister than in a regular oven, he says, because of the structure’s superior air circulation.

 

Indoor air quality is the chief advantage masonry heaters have over wood stoves, but, as Bushway notes, heaters must be properly designed (and used properly, too: a small chimney cleanout left open by mistake set off the Westervelts’ carbon monoxide detector). But because masonry heaters are mainly built by hand, builder certification is the only way to regulate their quality and safety. More builders are seeking certification, and Bushway, who was elected to the Masonry Heater Association’s board in April, is working on a set of more stringent certification guidelines, in case the Environmental Protection Agency decides to regulate masonry heaters the way it does wood stoves.

 

Compared to other forms of heating, masonry heaters are probably an energy-efficient pick. Bushway notes that in the Northeast, “We just happen to live in a part of the country where if you don’t keep mowing, the trees keep growing up.” A drafty house, however, will lose plenty of heat, whether it comes from a masonry heater or not.

 

Ninety minutes into Bushway’s visit, Julie Westervelt gleefully announces that the fire he’s built has warmed the house by four degrees. Bushway, however, is as self-effacing as ever. The house, he says, is very well insulated. [SEPTEMBER 2009]

 

Williamstown, Mass., native Kaitlin Bell is a Manhattan-based freelance writer. She received her master’s degree in magazine journalism from Columbia University last year.

 

 

THE GOODS

Deer Hill Masonry
Plainfield, Mass.

www.deerhillmasonry.com
www.ultimateridgehook.com