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Preston Hollow Modern — Single-Slab Limestone Surround

A 14-foot great room, anchored by one piece of stone

The house is a contemporary new build on a north-of-Walnut-Hill lot in Preston Hollow. The architect of record is a Dallas firm whose work appears regularly in the area’s recent inventory of clean-lined contemporary residences. The brief from the architect was uncomplicated to describe and demanding to execute. The great room needed a fireplace surround that would read as a single sculptural element — one piece of stone, no visible seams, no traditional mantel shelf, no contrasting hearth slip — anchored against a 14-foot drywall plane.

We were brought in by the design team in the second month of the build, before the framing of the fireplace wall was finalized. That timing mattered.

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The problem

The architect’s elevation showed a 9-foot-tall, 6-foot-wide block of limestone with a recessed linear firebox aperture cut horizontally across its lower third. The detail at the meeting of stone to drywall was specified as a quarter-inch shadow gap — meaning the stone could not touch the wall at any point, and the firebox could not telegraph through the stone face.

Three constraints made the project demanding. First, sourcing a single 9-foot block of Lueders limestone of the required grade and uniformity is not a routine order; most fabrication shops would have proposed a two-piece solution with a horizontal seam. Second, the linear firebox specified by the design team had a 60-inch viewing window, which meant the stone had to be precisely cut around the aperture without visible adjustment after install. Third, the framing of the fireplace wall had to be built to carry the dead load of a single-piece stone surround — roughly 1,400 pounds — without transferring deflection to the surrounding drywall.

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The work

We sourced the block from a regional Lueders quarry we have worked with for over a decade. The selection was made in person; the block was tagged at the quarry and held until our fabricator was ready. Fabrication was done off-site over four weeks, with the linear firebox aperture template provided directly by the firebox manufacturer to ensure exact tolerance.

Framing of the fireplace wall was coordinated with the project’s general contractor. We specified a doubled-stud assembly with a steel ledger sized to carry the surround, anchored to the slab and isolated from the drywall by a continuous resilient channel. The shadow gap was achieved by setting the stone proud of the finished drywall by three-quarters of an inch and trimming the drywall return back to a quarter-inch reveal, with the back-side cavity painted matte black so the eye reads the gap as void rather than as a seam.

The firebox is a low-profile linear direct-vent unit with a remote ignition and a programmable flame profile. The vent termination was routed through the rear wall of the room and exited through an architectural cap on the exterior, color-matched to the limestone of the chimney chase.

Installation of the surround took a single day. The block was delivered on a flatbed, lifted by a four-man crew with a stone-handling rig, dry-fit, adjusted, and set in a structural epoxy bed within an eight-hour window. The shadow gap was verified at every point along the perimeter before the crew left the site.

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Materials

• Lueders limestone, single 9-foot block, hand-selected
• Direct-vent linear gas firebox, 60-inch viewing window
• Structural epoxy bed system
• Steel ledger with doubled-stud framing assembly
• Architectural exterior vent cap, color-matched

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Timeline

Six weeks from architect’s elevation lock to commissioning. Stone fabrication was four weeks; framing coordination and rough-in were two weeks running parallel; installation was one day; commissioning and owner walk-through were the following week.

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Outcome

The room reads exactly as the elevation drew it. The stone is a single visual element. The firebox aperture is the only horizontal break in the surround, and the flame — when on — reads as embedded in the stone rather than mounted to it. The architect’s quarter-inch shadow gap is intact at every point.

The general contractor of the larger house has since referred us into two additional Preston Hollow projects on the same architectural register.

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Project credits

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Adjacent work

For more contemporary projects in the same architectural register, see the Preston Hollow whole-hearth renovation across three fireplaces, the Volk Estates traditional mantel redesign, or the broader outdoor fireplace catalog.

Return to the main portfolio index or browse the Preston Hollow area page.

To begin a comparable project, reach the design team at 214-444-8094.

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