Croft & Flame
The name is new. The hands are not.
Twenty-three years in Cumbria. Seventeen of them spent learning this trade properly, before I started one of my own.
The Vision
Somewhere to gather
I see a fireplace as the central focal point of a home, somewhere friends and family gather, somewhere the week finally slows down, somewhere you stay warm and safe from whatever is happening outside. A radiator can heat a room. It can't do any of that.
The fuel type should follow the way you actually live, not the other way round. Wood, gas, electric or bio-ethanol can each suit a home on its own, and sometimes a considered combination of them serves a household better than any single choice a media wall, in particular, brings real function to an awkward space, or solves a room that never had a fireplace to begin with.
The Journey
From the Cape to Cumbria
Before I came to the UK I was studying law and business. I came over for a break, and to play a bit of cricket, with no fixed plan beyond the next fixture. Travelling brought me to the Lake District, and the fells did what they do to people who linger too long among them, though it was meeting my wife, another South African finding her way, that settled it.
I decided to stay. Building a life here meant building a trade first, so I studied accountancy, a discipline that has quietly shaped everything I've done since.
The Trade
Seventeen years in other people's fireplaces
In 2009 I started in a small showroom just outside Kendal, learning an industry I hadn't expected to love. Fireplaces ask more of a business than people assume, technical precision, a steady hand, and patience with a customer choosing something that will sit at the centre of their home for decades.
Working alongside the business's founder, I helped grow that showroom into a group of businesses employing more than fifty people, and spent almost seventeen years as Finance and Operations Director. I learned what a well run fireplace business looks like from the inside, creating the systems and procedures, managing the accounts, the installs, the calls that come in after a chimney's gone cold.
The Eye
Learning to draw the room
The eye for it came early. My mother was an artist, and growing up around her work taught me to notice proportion, material and light before I had the words for any of it. I also studied a marketing and photography and working alongside architects and interior designers over the years sharpened that further.
About fifteen years ago I noticed clients struggled to picture a fireplace from a brochure photograph or a mood board, so I started drawing the concept myself, so that I could help the visualise. The skill and the process have both been refined many times since, sometimes today's drawing is a 3D render but the idea hasn't changed: you should be able to see it before you commit to it.
The Craft
Qualified by hand
After years of managing and aiding installations, in 2013, I qualified as a HETAS engineer and took on installing the fireplace side of the business directly. It changed how I saw the work.
Numbers tell you whether a business is healthy. Standing in someone's chimney breast with a smoke pellet and a flue gauge tells you whether the fire is actually safe. I wanted to understand both properly, not just one from a distance.
Croft & Flame
Building something of my own
In 2026 I started Croft & Flame. Not to do things differently for its own sake, but to do them properly, on my own terms, with a small team who care as much about the parts nobody sees as the parts that make the room.
A croft is a dwelling, stone built and carefully tended. Paired with flame, it's the oldest comfort there is. It felt like the right name for the fire I wanted to build.
Croft & Flame is also one of four partners in House of Carvetii, alongside Carvetii Town & Country Interiors, Majik House, and KQC Flooring. Different trades, but the same standard, work you'd put your own name to, done properly the first time. That's the kind of company I wanted to keep.
Three things I still measure every job against.
New Showroom Opening This Autumn
The best way to choose a fire is to stand in front of one.
Our new showroom sits at Lane House Business Park in Kirkby Lonsdale, built to show wood-burning, gas, electric, and bio-ethanol fires exactly as they'll sit in your own home, working examples across display area, from DRU and Dik Geurts to Chesney's and Rocal. Bring your measurements, or just come and see what suits the room you have in mind.
Kendal Road
Kirkby Lonsdale, LA6 2HH
Our suppliers and partners trusts us to get the installation right.
Room, hearth, clearances.
Central and multi sided stoves need more room around them than a wall mounted model, we start by checking what your space can genuinely take.
The fire as a feature.
Whether it's a sculptural central stove or a built in firebox for a media wall, we design the setting so the flame view is never compromised.
Fitted to HETAS standards.
Registered engineers, the correct flue and clearances, and building control notification handled
The first fire, lit together.
A full demonstration, the paperwork in your hand, and a stove you already know how to load, light and control.