Hestia, virginal and nary a myth to her name, is the Greek goddess of the hearth. Perched high on Mount Olympus, she would tend the gods’ fire. Zeus put her in charge of sacrifices, and combustible bits of animal flesh and fat would catch and spark as she fed offerings into the flames. While other mythical figures would venture out on odysseys and trickster expeditions, she was central to the continuity of family life—even the Real Housewives–esque craziness of hers.
It is from Hestia that we receive our domesticated idea of tending to the fireplace at home, and of gathering around the hearth (the translation of her Ancient Greek name)—a designed object that rises above its functional purpose, enhancing its users’ everyday lives as a site of communion and reflection. But times have changed. As the climate crisis upends seasonal expectations and increases the frequency of devastating fires, what’s the point of having a hearth in our homes now?
Relevancy, however, is relational, cultural, and geographic. It’s pushing 90 degrees in Los Angeles as I write; there is no hint of autumn. The very idea of cozying up around a yule log is more sweaty than hygge. Counties across Southern California receive burn days, authorized by local government agencies to regulate indoor and outdoor wood burning for fire safety and to limit polluting airborne particulates. Fireplaces are mostly decorative; we huddle around outdoor heat lamps in winter.
But even in our temperate climate, and among all kinds of housing including California Modernism, hearths prevail. The fireplace in Case Study #9, the home of publisher and Case Study Program founder John Entenza, is admittedly a minimalist affair. Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen designed what might be described as a console connected to a chimney tube. Squint your eyes and it could be television playing a loop of a flaming log. One door over, on Chautauqua Boulevard, a fireplace was planned for the living room in the Eames House (Case Study #8), but never constructed.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a huge proponent of the hearth, as his East Hollywood Hollyhock House attests. To him, it was the psychological center of the home: the architectural showstopper that draws people together, a place of warmth or community, even if more ancient tasks like cooking and drying are assigned to different parts of the house. (Let the servants tend to the sacrifices.) In L.A. and elsewhere, much of Wright’s architecture converges around the fireplace, as if Hestia herself tugs the visual lines. His monumental mantelpiece at the Hollyhock House is nothing less than elemental: an abstract bas-relief sculpture and tiled moat reference earth, air, fire, and water.
Austrian émigré Rudolph Schindler oversaw the construction of the Hollyhock House, and from his time working for Wright, seemingly inherited a love for the hearth. His own Kings Road House, in West Hollywood, has no fewer than six, including two outdoor concrete fireplaces that have the gravitas to transform courtyards into intimate rooms—although I’ve never seen one lit.
Modernist or otherwise, California fireplaces are places of gravity within the home. They don’t have to radiate warmth to bring people together—they are a domestic fixture that transcends function. This might explain the hearth’s longevity—especially when contemporary life often comes with All Mod Cons. Fire is the light in the dark, until it isn’t.
This past January, both Modernist residences were nearly consumed by the Palisades Fire. It’s miraculous that they survived. These structures, so confident in promoting innovative designs for a burgeoning middle class, exist in a liminal space between impermanence and longevity. Built out of the plainest of materials—glass, steel, wood, aluminum, plaster—their persistence is an act of fate. On the bluff above, block after block of single-family homes were reduced to smoldering ruin.
Across town, the Eaton Fire devastated Altadena. Before the fire, Altadena’s foothills were a pattern book of historical styles from different eras: modest stucco homes decked out in Regency or Spanish Revival, grand 19th-century shingled mansions, white Modern boxes. The conflagration left behind its own memorial: chimneys, one rising from almost every lot, each a reminder of a hearth and the people who gathered there.
In the weeks after, residents and Angelenos struggled to make sense of the loss. Artist Amir Nikravan posted a photograph on Instagram of what was left of his childhood home in Altadena: a chimney and fireplace. The sculptural pile of brick and river rock was built by his father, Robert Jaffe, after the Northridge earthquake cracked the original. The composition shows a blacked tower rising from a pile of ash, framed by the silhouettes of singed trees.
“My dad is a tinkerer and maker of all things, whose heart and soul are sometimes more prominent in the things he makes than the aesthetic end results—yet he has an aesthetic that is all his own—one that reflects his deep affinity for natural materials, and finding ways to never sacrifice a material’s natural state at the cost of functionality,” Nikravan wrote in the caption. “My father’s sculpture proved to me the resilience of art in the face of utter destruction.”
Jaffe’s ranch-style house was built in the 1940s and was part of a NAACP initiative to encourage home ownership in Altadena’s Black community. By the time he undertook its restoration, in the early 1990s, the home had fallen into disrepair. He spent two years working to make it livable again. Plywood covered the fireplace, hiding a hearth covered in Batchelder tiles.
Made by artist Ernest Batchelder in the first half of the 20th century, the Arts and Crafts ceramic tiles are found in homes across Southern California. In the aftermath of the Eaton firestorm, they were some of the only things that survived. Volunteers, united as the ad hoc organization Save the Tiles, collected the glazed slabs, trying to stay ahead of Army Corps of Engineers efforts to clear lots. Amidst the cinders, crews labored to chisel tiles off mantelpieces with the hopes of restoring the salvaged ceramics and returning them to homeowners—each carrying memories into the future.
The Batchelder tiles from Jaffe’s home were preserved, but the chimney was ultimately bulldozed. Nikravan lost his apartment in the fire, along with many of his own sculptures and designed objects given to him by friends and family. When he viewed the remains of his father’s fireplace alongside thousands of others in the neighborhood, he saw a temporary monument. “These are markers of time, markers of history, markers of places where people existed or lived, even if they are not permanent,” he recalled.
In ancient Greece, Hestia’s sacred fire burned in every city and village. The prytaneion, a communal hearth in the agora, unified people around a shared flame. Individual fireplaces may be nearly obsolete, but we still need places, objects to bring people together and remember.
Eventually, Los Angeles will erect a monument to commemorate the fires. It should be a hearth.