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Let Me Stand Next to Your Fire
Wallingford's Fireplace Store turns up the heat during flue season
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Business New Haven
12/29/1997
By: Albert S. Coppola
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If you turn off I-91 and take Route 5 to Wallingford, through the mixed-use checkerboard of heavy industry, housing developments, commercial strips and park land.
Some four miles after you leave the interstate you'll come to a large house-like, structure that seems slightly out of place among the deliberate architecture along the strip. The words “Fireplace Store” are written in large white letters across its roof.
Turn into the gravel drive, make your way past the sheds in the parking lot, step inside and you'll find it...well, rather cozy. After all, this is the Fireplace Store, which sells all manner of fireplaces, wood stoves and fireplace accessories - as well as a wide array of specialty candles in an annex. With fires crackling away in models on display, the business has the same kind of effect on a prospective customer as a bakery does - it appeals to the senses, and it can be awfully persuasive.
This kind of low-key approach to retail suits John Bennett, the Fireplace Store's owner, just fine. In business since 1976, Bennett is still at his original location, which he says he bought from a farmer.
“This was all big farm, and the building we're in now used to be a big cow barn,” he says of his 4,000-square-foot store and showroom. “The cows were down here, and the horses were kept upstairs,” he says, motioning first to a large room lined with dozens of models of wood stoves, furnaces and fireplaces, and then to the upstairs entrance area, which showcases various glass fireplace doors and a glinting assortment of tools and other accessories.
Back when he first started the business, Bennett recalls that Route 5 was “just starting to build up. I guess the McDonald's was there, the car dealers and the supermarket.”
Those were the days of Jimmy Carter's “energy crisis,” which Bennett says was the reason he got into the fireplace business in the first place. That era, he says, brought a “re-popularization of the wood stove.” To decrease their reliance on expensive heating oil, “People were looking for alternate sources of heat.”
While at first, homeowners turned to him hoping to cut their heating bills, Bennett says that over the years another type of customer has emerged. “There are people that are trying to heat their house with it,” he explains, “strictly for the economy of it.” But now there's “another type of person. Maybe he's adding a room on his house and the heating system isn't enough to handle it, or maybe they just want the ambiance of a fireplace.”
To meet the varying needs of his clientele, Bennett carries all manner of heating units for the home - wood-burning furnaces for the basement, as well as combination wood-and-gas or wood-and-electric models; decorative wood-burning stoves, natural gas fireplaces with ceramic logs, and new wood pellet-burning stoves that require no chimney.
Bennett says he also does a bustling business in prefabricated fireplaces, which he sells primarily to building contractors.
The business, he says, is healthy and varies little from year to year. Last year, for example, Bennett estimates his gross revenues at about $500,000, “but we won't know until we sit down with the numbers.” A seasonal business, Bennett said that fully half of his sales occur from September to December.
Bennett estimates that he sells “probably 100 to 125” stove units a year. They form the bulk of his business, running between $1,000 and $2,000 for the unit itself and installation being as much as another $1,000 on top of that.
Surprisingly, Bennett says that, in his experience, the stove business is not terribly sensitive to fluctuations in the economy. In boom times, he says, homeowners add on to their houses and look to buy his stoves for their charm and decorative effect. In leaner years, sales remain strong as people purchase wood stoves to reduce their heating bills.
One area of his business that has grown unintentionally is his sale of candles. Overseen by his wife, Judy, Bennett says that candle sales have “mushroomed” since November 1996, when his wife convinced him to add another room to their store to showcase their merchandise.
A long time Yankee Candle vendor, Bennett says his wife expanded their offerings after attending a trade show. Now, he said, candle sales could be “about half the business. It's hard to say right now” since the couple haven't run the 1997 books yet.
Bennett recalls a time when the Fireplace Store wasn't strictly a retailer. “It was in the early '80s,” he says, “when we designed and build our own wood stoves. Back then there was a tremendous shortage of stoves.” Then there were just a handful of producers, and they couldn't meet demand for the product.
Seeing an opportunity, Bennett devised a simple design “pretty much based on the Franklin stove,” referring to a model in wide use. He had his stoves' components forged in the state and then assembled them at the Fireplace Store. “We shipped them all over, as far away as Colorado, Canada and Alaska,” he recalls.
The end of the line came, he says, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set new emissions requirements for wood stoves in 1987 and 1988, requiring that they employ a “secondary air” system - i.e., a second combustion process - to limit exhaust particulates to less than eight grams per hour.
There had been many small producers of stoves that entered the market about the time he did, but Bennett says that nearly all were pushed out of the marketplace by the new regulations. The design, testing and approval of such a system proved to be too great an expense for small
producers. “It was mostly paperwork” that killed the small stove manufacturer, he says.
Trained as an electrical engineer at the University of Connecticut, Bennett, 69, says he quickly left the field because it proved “too technical, too out of this world.” After working as a housing contractor and builder for many years, Bennett's sole enterprise since 1976 has been the Fireplace Store.
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