It might be the best summer we’ve had in Scotland in recent memory and certainly the vision of a legion of sunburned beer bellies parading around the streets of Glasgow will be seared onto my retinas for sometime to come, but it’s time to think about the heating for the House at Cuil Bay.

Today I received the sketches for our masonry stove, so while basking in the sun I am casting up a dreich winter day snuggled on a bench against a heated wall and about to take a hot casserole out of the stove’s oven.

The stove designs have come from from StoveMason, based in Brechin. As far as I could tell (from a brief websearch), he is the only company in Scotland installing masonry stoves.

The reason we are going for a masonry stove as it is something that I have seen work really well in Switzerland where we go regularly to see the in-laws. You not only see beautiful masonry stoves inlaid with tiles in old farm houses, but also modern interpretations in brand new houses and apartments. It is an extremely efficient way of using wood fuel as it circulates the hot air around a maze of bricks inside the stove that absorb and retain the heat rather than it being flushed out of the chimney and lost to the house.

Swiss friends tell me that, rather than burning fuel all the time to keep the house warm, you do a couple of intense burns of wood at high temperature, one in the morning to get the house warm for the day, and one in the evening to heat the house for the night. This method appeals to me because, aside from the environmental benefits, since installing our wood burning stove in our terrace house, finding wood has become a rather obsessive activity, and anything that reduces the demand for wood must be a good thing.

The other appeal is that they are just wonderful. You can have a baking oven, a heated seat or bench, heated walls and a heated panel upstairs as well. We have designed the house with the intention of having the masonry stove right in the centre. It will have a heated wall next to a bench in the hall, an oven for casseroles (bread/pizza? – not sure whether it gets hot enough) in the kitchen and the main part of the stove in the main living area of the house.

If we would be moving there straight away then I think we would consider having the masonry stove as our main source of heat but, given that we will be renting the house out, I think that we will need to complement it with an automated system that needs no human input and that we can operate remotely to ensure the house is warm for holiday arrivals. We haven’t quite decided what this is likely to be, but I can assure you that a blog will follow on this soon enough.

More on masonry stoves here