Inspiration: Lew French

Project Wildfire draws direct inspiration from the work of master stone artisan Lew French of LewFrenchStone.com.

As you can see in the photo above, Lew is a true artist of natural stone. His eye for proportion, balance, and flow is exceptional—I hold his work in the highest regard.

How It Started

Over more than a decade, we had built nearly everything around a couple in Lutherville, Md's home: the front masonry porch, 2 walks, planting beds, landscape lighting front and back, and the rear bluestone patio with natural stone seat wall. As I walked around the house today, I look with pride, as everything we had built was beautiful artwork that all settled in with no trip hazards or visual blemishes.

So in the fall of 2025 the husband had a friend send him a picture of an outdoor fireplace that the friend built himself. Large scale, about the same dimensions as Project Wildfire (14 ft wide x 14ish ft tall). The wife, knowing that the husband loved to sit outside on the patio we had built for them and smoke his cigars, said, "Why don't you have G build one for you." As he was currently sitting around a small metal firepit, she felt like he earned an upgrade.

The husband reached out to me, and sent me the picture his friend had sent him. I sent him a link of Lew's Fireplace, and asked what he thought of it. We had not yet agreed to a price, but he said, "Put us into your schedule."

Design: Sketch

I had transitioned to CAD years earlier, hadn’t done a hand rendering in nearly a decade. Because of the complexity of the design, I felt like picking up a pencil and sketching.

Truly, I felt like the ideas just flowed out of me almost on auto pilot, it was almost effortless, with very little thinking. I do many other types of art, including music, stand-up comedy, graphic design, and generally these things are painstaking, iteration after iteration, seriously heavy brain work that takes days and months to get right. But to my amazement, in about 2 hours, I had something I really liked (the design above). 

Stone Purchasing

The day after I got the go ahead, I started stone hunting.

Sourcing the stone was tricky. All of the larger pieces were to be one-of-a-kind, selected individually for how well they fit into the actual design. Finding these stones took patience, experience, traveling, and would not be inexpensive.

I visited numerous retailers and quarries, and took every stone in the design and did my best to find it in reality. The high horizontal stone in the original design was drawn at almost 12 feet wide. I couldn't find anything that big, but I found a stone 10' with cutouts on each end. I found the other stones, literally one at a time, from various sources, and then erased and redrew the design with the new stones in place, above. 

This was Version 2.0 that I showed the clients, by text. I was not super happy with it, thought something was missing.

I took about 2 hours, and started into more curved outer edges. I abandoned the concept after numerous iterations, as I just could not get anything to look pleasing. As I look at it now upon writing this, this style of design could perhaps be magnificent for a future build. King Cobra.

I realized that we had a pallet of 3 superstepper stones, massive, chunky, and two of them might be perfect to cantilever out as shoulders and be quite the spectacular finishing touch to the entire project.

As I write this, we are at the point in the build where we need to actually figure out how to engineer building them into the firestack, and do so in a way that is durable and will last. Certainly, everyone is going to want to climb up, and stand and sit on them (I'll be first).

For all its imperfections, here is the final design. We shall see how close we come to this after the build!

Project Wildfire

Is an original, hand-built outdoor fireplace, in no way a reproduction. It is a custom stone structure built in my own voice—shaped by decades of creative experience—while openly acknowledging the influence of a craftsman whose work continues to inspire me.

As Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Right now, I’m proudly standing on Lew French's shoulders.

If you would like a Fireplace along these lines, inside or outside of your home, please call me on my cell- G:

1+443-797-2166