Elena Colombo knows that you don’t have to sacrifice functionality for style. The New York artist and architectural designer behind FireFeatures has built a business crafting sculpturesque, ignitable pieces. “Our mission is to create art that works,” she tells Business of Home.
When Colombo was growing up in northeastern Pennsylvania, her father was a contractor and she spent a lot of time working with him in his woodshop gleaning carpentry skills. As an undergraduate, she studied art and architecture at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, before taking a job as a production artist and prop maker for the TV series Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which was filmed at Broadcast Arts in New York. “It was a show that was an extravaganza of creativity that combined miniature sets for animated skits with a soundstage where the live action was shot,” says Colombo. “It was a mind-blowing and expansive experience, and I spent the next 16 years in animation and film production as a director of television commercials.”
All that changed on September 11, 2001, when television production ceased and the advertising world was upended. Colombo relocated to a small beach cottage on Long Island, and had an aha moment not long after. “I wanted to build a fire, but all my firewood was wet,” she explains. “I thought, ‘Why can’t I just hook up a big bowl to my house’s gas [supply] and have an on-and-off bonfire?’ So that’s what I did.”
The following year, she launched FireFeatures with the Firebowl, a shapely spherical design with flip-switch gas ignition. “I hired a junior architect friend to help me make shop drawings for it, and simultaneously, I went to my local propane dealer and asked if they could rig a big, round, concrete planter that I sourced with a burner so I could begin testing the concept,” she says. “They connected an old swimming pool heater burner to a propane tank, and voilà!”
She sold her first spun metal Firebowl to famed hotelier André Balazs for installation at his Sunset Beach resort on Shelter Island, and the rest is history. “It was an immediate success, with hundreds of people sitting around and communing after such a disruptive time in all our lives,” she says.
All of Colombo’s designs draw inspiration from the natural environment, often beginning with a foraged object—such as a tree branch or beach rocks—that gets turned into a mold and then cast in metals including stainless steel, copper and bronze. “I love to integrate our metal fire features with stone bases to combine manufactured elements with organic ones,” she says. “We’ve worked with granite, slate, western mountain stone, limestone, marble and bluestone, and use CAD and water-jet cutting to manipulate the stone into the desired shape.”
Along with designing artful gas-burning fire pits, Colombo also creates large-scale public fire-based installations, including The Bridge, a sweeping corten steel arc in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. “We are also lucky to work with a wide creative group of architects, landscape architects, interior designers and contractors on site-specific bespoke features,” she says. “Additionally, any of our existing designs can be adapted to tailored size and material.”
Her latest collection, Ikebana, pays homage to the Japanese art of flower arranging and features an undulating, basket-like urn design composed of curved metal strips. “Gathering around a fire is such an ancient ritual that I think most of us feel in our soul,” says Colombo. “I hear all the time from friends, family, and even strangers how memories are created around one of my features, and as a result, what I do never seems like work.”
If you want to learn more about Elena Colombo, visit the FireFeatures website or Instagram.
