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About Us

About Vie De Feu

Vie de Feu is the Ontario distributor of the exceptional line of Focus fireplaces, handling the exclusive promotion, sales, service and custom installation of the Focus brand. With over twenty years of experience in the hearth industry, Vie de feu is committed to providing the design community with fireplace products of unparalleled quality and creativity.

About Focus Fireplaces

Since the Gyrofocus, created in 1968, and the Renzofocus, Stonefocus and Kinefocus designed in 2007, Focus has transformed itself from an artist’s studio to an international business. During the course of 1972, two models were sold; the current sales exceed 3500 fireplaces a year. All Focus fireplaces have been created by Dominique Imbert, who set us his workshop in 1967 in Viols le Fort, in the south of France. Today 35 people have joined him there to work at the company’s head office with an additional 50 people employed at Focus’s production site at Cavaillon. To this date 150 jobs have been created directly or indirectly by the company Atelier Dominique Imbert which produces the Focus brand. Focus Fireplaces are manufactured exclusively in France.

Awards

- Winner of the Atami Competition (Japan 1989) - Selected for the Premio Design Italiano (Rome 1992) - National Prize for “Best Creation”, awarded by the French Trade Minister (Paris 1995) - Museum of Contemporary Art (Bordeaux 1996) - National Centre of Contemporary Art (Grenoble 1997) - Guggenheim Museum (New York 1998) - Moderna Museet (Stockholm 2000) - Selected by Norman Foster and Associates (London 2000) - Gold Design Prize winner at Batimat (Paris 2001) - Selected “Top 100 of the Best French companies” (2004) - Silver Medal for design in Stuttgart in 2004. - Silver Design Prize winner at Batimat (Paris 2007)

Contact Focus

Vie de Feu - Focus Showroom 5490 Harvester Rd. @ Burloak Burlington, On L7L 5V4 t. 905 681 3070 | 1866 909 3070 f. 905 681 8697 To request a Focus catalogue with a complete list of Focus fireplace models, a product manual, press enquiries or for any further information please contact: mina@focusfireplace.ca

Dominique Imbert

Dominique Imbert, the creator of Focus, was born in 1940 in Montpellier in the South of France. After studying literature in London and Paris, he became, “by accident”, as he puts it, an ethnologist in Alaska and an assistant chef in Manhattan, before being awarded a Doctorate in Sociology at the Sorbonne and becoming a literature professor in a Paris Lycée. After teaching for four years, he decided he preferred shaping metal to moulding young minds, and in 1967, he set up a workshop making steel sculptures in the village of Viols-le-Fort in the garrigue north of Montpellier. It was at this studio that he designed his first fireplace for his own personal use, then repeated the exercise for others who fell in love with what he had created ... and this was how Focus began. This self-taught sculptor-designer moves easily between his many passions, creating bronze and steel sculptures as well as fireplaces and furniture. The thread that unites all his creations is his insistence on quality, a pursuit shared by the exceptional team that works with him. In order to attain the quality he demands, Focus runs the production and distribution of all their products, and in the face of outsourcing has chosen to support the local production sites of their fireplaces. For this free-spirited artist, the independence to follow intuition rather than convention or trend is his guiding force: “What interests me is discovering and shaping the poetry and spirit of an object,” he says. Yet this artist has also negotiated million dollar contracts in Japan, exports fireplaces to markets from Lithuania to Russia, Australia to Israel, and is directly or indirectly responsible for some 80 jobs. When asked to explain his singular philosophy, he simply cites Le Corbusier with an enigmatic smile: “Tradition consists of inventing your epoch…”