• The mantel of a corner fireplace looks best with a simple treatment.room with fireplace image by Dumitrescu Ciprian from Fotolia.com
  
  The corner fireplace is too expensive to remove or too cozy to give up. Either way, you have to do something with it so it complements the rest of the room. A deep corner shelf allows you to place substantial objects on the mantel that wouldn't fit on a straight, shallow shelf. And the angle can lead to some eye-catching design solutions.
  
  

Rustic Decor

• A mortared stone fireplace in a corner can be a design plus, not a challenge, if you treat the whole corner as a sculpture. The mantel is either slate or wood---and if it needs replacing, go for barn wood to emphasize character. Then place several carefully curated objects on the mantel. A small found nest with blown-out pheasant eggs is pretty---tilt it to show the eggs inside. But a nest you make from a circle of grapevines is even better. Place one emptied, rinsed and dried ostrich egg in the nest and you have a conversation piece. A section of turned table leg or banister, stripped and remade into a large candlestick, is the perfect base for a beeswax pillar candle; use a glass chimney if you will light it next to the nest. A slate corner mantel stands out in autumn with a fat pumpkin in the center and a scatter of colored leaves drifted on either side.
  
  

Mirrors

• It's tricky to place a mirror over a corner fireplace mantel. In a room with textured, painted walls, an antique mirror that sits catty-corner atop the mantel works well. It is essential to pay attention to proportion of the mirror---too small and it looks puny; too big and it looks shoehorned into the space. Another approach that works with period or modern corner fireplaces is to collect a random assortment of interesting mirrors, all or some of them unframed, and hang them on the corner walls at right angles to each other. This makes for lively reflections and a single tall sculpture or an unusual lamp centered on the mantel or hung as a corner pendant turns the whole fireplace into a gallery piece.
  
  

Holidays and Seasons

• Yule, solstice, Christmas---corner fireplaces are simply cozy when decorated for the holidays. A velvet shawl with dangling tassels dresses up a plain wood mantel. If the corner is deep enough, you can put a tiny tree there and heap small tinseled gift packages around it. An oversized candle holder and huge red or forest green pillar candle makes a good centerpiece when surrounded by shiny, painted glass baubles. Luckily, the edge of the mantel shelf is straight enough to use for the Christmas stockings. At Thanksgiving, put a horn of plenty on the mantel and let colorful decorative gourds spill out of it. To celebrate spring, a pot of tulips flanked by pots of narcissus or hyacinths is fragrant and brightens up the room. In summer, a collection of decorative watering cans lined up with a vase of daylilies, sunflowers or hydrangeas, fills the deep corner with its own garden.
  
  

Curved or Missing Mantel

• If a period corner fireplace has a skinny curved mantel, replace it with a curved slab of marble and leave it plain. The marble is its own interest. Or line up perfectly matched objects around it---like a collection of glass paperweights. For a contemporary corner fireplace with no mantel, hang a painting over the fireplace to balance the corner and prevent the firebox from looking orphaned.