Eagle County fireplace business expands into Edwards
Inferno red trucks, well-read on safety, Lance family puts safety first
David O. Williams/Vail Daily
As a freeskier, ski coach and longtime Vail lift mechanic, Jason Lance knows a little bit about putting safety first. In some ways, he and his wife Jennifer Lance have become maniacal about that mantra as they expand their Alpine Valley Fireplace business in Edwards.
The Lances have a wall full of national and regional fire safety certifications since they first launched Alpine Valley Fireplace in January of 2020 – and even a few before then when Jason first left Vail Resorts in 2018 to work for another local fireplace company. The Lances are constantly engaged in continuing education that has opened their eyes to just how badly fireplaces are installed in the Eagle River Valley, dating back many decades.
“Integrity is our biggest thing, where we continually educate ourselves,” Jason said. “With all of our training, we feel like we’re the gold standard around here now, and so if anyone has their fireplace replaced by Alpine Valley Fireplace, we’d love to take care of it for the next 20 years for you. And we will work on fireplaces we didn’t install up to a certain year.”
Alpine Valley Fireplace won’t work on anything 25 years or older, and they don’t really work on open-hearth log sets anymore because so many are improperly installed or too old. In real estate transactions, especially for older homes, modern fireplace installation and inspection standards require a level of rigor that sometimes finds unanticipated problems for buyers.
“For a home sale, we would have to do a level two inspection to meet our requirements … our professional standards (per the National Fire Protection Association) say that you have to do a level two,” Jason said. “And a level two means putting a camera up the chimney.”
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Jennifer Lance explains what that entails: “”Getting into the attic, getting in crawl spaces. You’re supposed to look at all of this to make sure it was properly inspected or installed and that over time … one thing that happens a lot, people don’t realize the insulation inside their wall falls down. It’s not secure. And it’s sitting on the fireplace and there’s supposed to be airspace around the firebox and it’s trapping heat and it could be a fire hazard.”
The Lances started out as a servicing company out of their condo, but now that they’ve moved into a former kitchen design store in Edwards Village Center, they’ve transitioned to primarily sales and news installations. Much of that has to do with the longevity of fireplaces.
“So, a lot of people think (a fireplace) lasts forever. One of the rules of thumbs I use is your fireplace lasts about the length of your roof; it’s about 20, 25 years,” Jason said. “That’s the main thing we’re trying to stress to people … they’re engineered for about 15 to 20 years of use.”
The Lances say they’re not just trying to sell people new fireplaces; they really are concerned about safety in older homes that people want to last a long time or are considering remodeling. They want folks to consider the fireplace along with their boiler, roof, heating systems and other home infrastructure that will need to be replaced at some point in time.
“What really breaks our hearts is when a homeowner comes into our showroom here, they just bought a multi-million-dollar house and they had it inspected but not to the right levels or degrees, and then they’re like, ‘Oh, my boiler went out … and now my fireplace is bad,'” Jason said. “And so we want to make sure people are getting all the right information and are able to make an educated decision on their fireplace.”
Jennifer points out that, in a remodel, if you get all new windows, spruce up your kitchen hood, maybe put a new roof on, suddenly the fireplace might not work anymore because it’s an open-hearth model that relies on air exchange in your home. Sleek new sealed-glass units don’t have those same requirements.
Jennifer moved to Vail in 2013 after running a baggage store in Breckenridge, taking over Baggage Cheque in the Austria Haus in Vail Village. Unable to find employees and working round the clock to just get by, she showed uncanny timing by shutting down in the fall of 2019, grateful to get out of her lease and sell all her inventory right before the COVID crash.
“Thankfully, I decided to close down in October 2019,” said Jennifer, a world traveler in her own right with degrees from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the University of London School of Economics and Political Science. “Otherwise, I would have hit COVID and kind of lost everything.”
Working part time in finance for Vail Resorts and moving in with Jason, they decided to get into the fireplace business. Jason had just ended a long run in lift maintenance with Vail Resorts – a job that allowed him to help lead the first wave of “new-school” freeskiers in the late 1990s.
“When we were planning the business, we bought our first truck. All the Toyota Tacomas, they’re inferno orange, and that’s their factory color,” Jason said. “We’re like, if we’re going to have a fireplace business, our trucks need to be inferno orange. We took out a loan and Jen’s like, we’re not married, but financially, we’re connected here, so this is serious. And then we got married that summer in 2020.”
For more information about Alpine Valley Fireplace, located at 105 Edwards Village Blvd., contact the Lances through their website, or call them at 970-471-4341.