I've inherited not one but two plain-Jane mantels at The Unseemly House. One resides in the living room, with its Colonial-style dentil molding cackling back at me. The other is in the family room and is about as plain as you can get — a wall of brown brick with no shelf to rest even a match on. To make matters worse, the fireplace spans the corner of the room.

Leave it to the store-display artists at Anthropologie to come up with a worthy fireplace front. Constructed from stained boards stacked horizontally, this fireplace warms its corner of the Stony Point store. 

While I've thought slate, steel or tile for my mantels, none have the depth and texture of these boards. I can envision the boards all being whitewashed, too.