How are Grand-Mère wood-fired ovens made?

Building an authentic wood-fired oven is a lot like making a good dish. To succeed, you need the very best ingredients and passionate craftsmen with unique skills. Here we take a look at some of the facets of Grand-Mère oven making, combining tradition and innovation.

$four grand mere visuels voute en briques et chamotte réfractaire$

Refractory chamotte, the essential ingredient of all our ovens .

his is a refractory material which stores the heat released by the combustion of the wood before returning it very slowly.

All Grand-Mère ovens are made from 100% refractory chamotte, a clay baked and finely crushed in France. Our workers then mix this chamotte with water and aluminous cement to form a kind of malleable paste: refractory concrete.

Finally, stainless steel fibres are incorporated into the refractory concrete. It is this concrete reinforced with refractory chamotte that gives our ovens their durable non-cracking structure, even if the name suggests otherwise.

After being cast in a mould, the structure of the furnace is finished and then brushed by hand.

Terracotta brick: power and authenticity

Most Grand-Mère ovens are available in 2 versions: brick vault or refractory chamotte vault. If our chamotte ovens are very efficient, the brick-built vaults offer incomparable charm while improving the refractory qualities and longevity of the oven.

We only use bricks manufactured in France from a supplier with an EPV certificate, Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant – Living Craft Enterprise. For a perfect fit each time, we manually cut the bricks before joining them, always by hand!
For impeccable aesthetics, we dress our bricks in a way that is unique to us, reproducing the appearance of the ovens of the past with their beautiful stretcher and header brickwork. In these old ovens, you see the shortest and most attractive side of the brick – the “tip”.

This exclusive know-how gives our ovens the inimitable appearance and qualities of a traditional brick oven.

four grand mere visuels fabrication cintre briqueté

four grand mere visuels fabrication des hotes et de l'isolation

Efficient insulators for optimal inertia

To ensure that our ovens remain hot for a long time without heat loss, we mainly use 3 insulators all manufactured in France:

• vermiculite, a light and natural eco-material, close to the mica family.
• perlite, an ecological sand of volcanic origin.
• high temperature mineral wool. 6cm of mineral wool retains heat as well as 60cm of sand !

traditional artisanal craftsmanship

A unique touch and 100% French production

All our ovens are 100% made in France in our workshops in Vosges, from the production of the chamotte to painting the cover hoods. It was a very demanding decision, but we made it since every operation and every detail matters when you want to create an oven of excellence.

In our workshop in Vosges, a dozen highly devoted workers build about 600 ovens each year. Thus we are able to keep rare and unique know-how alive for the world. For example, we are the only company to manufacture hand-made bricked ovens in kit form.
Visitors are often surprised to see that most operations are performed by hand. There are hardly any machines in our workshops!