Wood Fired Ovens Stroud Gloucestershire – a complete guide

I’ve decided to make a more local blog post as enquiries seem to come from anywhere in the country and it could be that people from my local area may not know about us yet. Yes we are based in Stroud, Gloucestershire and have been here since December 2021 but have only managed a few local projects-

1. Cotswold stone Outdoor kitchen in Slad- F800 pizza oven with Parilla grill
2. Two door pizza oven in Stonehouse- F800 with doors facing into the kitchen and outdoor terrace
3. A large commercial pizza oven in Nailsworth-F1400 brick oven, Oldstone restaurant

4. Small domestic ALFRED 700 oven Randwick, Stroud

5. Cotswold stone clad F800 brick oven with Flamery BBQ, private garden Lechlade

Although quite distinct ovens they show the different styles of oven we do, from small domestic to large commercial. Our enormous range from the smallest 700mm internal diameter to large 3m commercial wood fired bakery ovens means we can supply pretty well anything you could ever want , installed by a team with over 17 years experience of all different types of oven be it simple cob, brick or modular kit. Our brick ovens all have a 10 year guarantee while the chamotte ovens attract a 5 year guarantee against faults making them one of the best wood fired pizza ovens on the market.

Wood fired ovens Stroud Gloucestershire- small enough to care but big enough to cope

is one of the longest surviving design and build businesses in the country having started in 2008 and has hundreds of installations nationwide with further builds planned for a bakery oven in an historic house on the Isle of Man , a new tiled sauna stove for a private estate on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland and a remodelled brick bakery oven for a large historic private estate in Ilam, Staffordshire Peak District. Following our sauna heater build for a Russian spa in London, we have expanded our offerings now to include wood fired sauna heaters as the wellness market continues to grow and develop.

If you’re a local small restaurant, a pub or growing commercial chain please get in contact with us here and we’ll get back to you to discuss your plans. We love to develop relationships with local businesses and can offer not only free unbiased advice but also a full design and build package to get you on your way.

Here are a few projects not yet featured on the projects page but are fairly local to us in Stroud-

L’Ecole des Amis – https://www.lecoledesamis.co.uk  A superb French restaurant in a converted primary school in Credenhill, Herefordshire not far from Hereford. We installed a F950 brick oven in 2024 next to the open kitchen

Cafe ODE- https://odetruefood.com . Winner of sustainable food, Tim Bouget continues to serve some of the best locally sourced food in the South West, based at his restaurant in Shaldon, near Teignmouth, Devon. We installed a T1350 brick oven in 2025 that was rescued from a kitchen fire at a nearby Holiday Park

Widbrook Grange hotel- https://www.widbrookgrange.co.uk Hotel near Bradford on Avon that now has one of our pizza ovens for events and weddings.

Private garden in Lechlade- a cotswold stone clad F800 with Flamery bbq.

Modular pizza ovens

I’ve added this blog mainly because not all these options are visible on the main website so I thought a blog post could expand on what is listed so you know that these options exist. We are lucky to be working with a company that took the modular concept and created a series of ovens based around the F950 as a core. Imagine having an oven made in two halves, front and back and you have the 950.

Now think of how one could make a larger oven from this basic configuration, yes you guessed it, just add interleaves between the two halves and bingo you have a whole new larger oven either in length or width. Genius!

As far as I know, Four Grand-Mere is the only company making such an adaptable range of ovens without adding too much expense to original cost.

Take that 950 and add a section of hearth and dome in between the front and back and you get a whole new oven just by adding an interleaf. The interleaf is made in the same way as the rest of the oven and just slots into position adding 22cm at its smallest, then 33 and finally 44cm, What one ends up with is a longer oven ideal for bread baking or pizza.

Take this modular pizza ovens idea and how about making it wider by turning the two halves into ‘wings’ and add an arch section in to make the oven wider than deep. You end up with our very popular ‘lateral’ ovens, the FT1350 and FT1500. These ovens are a god send for kitchens that have limited working space and need an oven that fits in-line with other equipment rather than sticking out as a long or round oven would.

Available in the usual options chamotte, brick and raised dome, they are a fantastic addition to the FGM range in our commercial oven options.

In addition to the interleaf idea, we also have a whole range of two door ovens that replaces part of one dome with another arch so access is possible via two doors, One door can be inside a room and the other facing outside or simply one used so customers can see through one end and watch their pizza being cooked through a closed glass door while the other faces the chef in a kitchen. I’ve done a whole separate blog about two door ovens so please check it out if you’re interested.

In short, modular pizza ovens have the huge advantage of making a new larger oven without the associated cost of having stock of every oven as the interleaves can be made when ordering the oven and makes better use of the moulds that already exist. Modular ovens as opposed to hand made brick ovens have existed for over 50 years but I thinkFour Grand-Mere have added a lot of functionality to the concept by making interchangeable sections and a logical use of shapes.

Those made from the traditional Italian orange-segment type of dome are more limited in their adaptability although having said that, Four Grand-Mere have a range within the SP series that you can add second doors to even though the arrangement is segments resting on a central key stone supported or hung from a steel frame.

The steel frame or multiples of, mean that larger, wider domes are possible without being self supporting, the whole weight being borne by a series of hangers and the load spread down to the feet of the frame resting on a steel table or masonry. In this way very large low domed bakery ovens are possible without having a buttress at the sides to take the load of a long arch.

Modular pizza ovens are here to stay and while there is a small market for hand made brick ovens, the convenience, ease and speed of assembly of manageable modules make them an ideal solution for the modern market

Domestic v Commercial pizza ovens- what exactly is the difference ?

This piece is mainly concerned with those small businesses that want to start small but think they are maybe getting a poorer quality oven than those larger, obviously ‘commercial’, pizza ovens. Our partner Four Grand-Mere based in the Alsace in N E France has been making wood-fired and gas pizza and bakery ovens since the 1970’s for both domestic and commercial customers.

We as importers and installers have to know that the domestic v commercial pizza ovens we install are going to stand the test of time and can relieve some of the worries that anyone buying an expensive bit of kit has about longevity and build quality.

Let’s start with the basics-

The materials used. Broadly speaking, Four Grand-Mere make only two types of oven-one that is called C chamotte and B, a hybrid of chamotte and brick. This applies across the whole range of ovens whether they are domestic or commercial. Chamotte is a type of high alumina concrete ( Ciment Fondu) using volcanic sands and aggregates that when cast into shapes will withstand the force of high heat trying to break it down.

Ordinary Portland cement will fall apart with constant high heat and is only safe to use at temperatures under 100C. The Chamotte casting also has stainless steel micro fibres that help strengthen the cast shapes for the extreme heating and cooling cycle that all the ovens endure.

The chamotte and brick version is cast in moulds in the same way as pure chamotte but is then lined with brick slips that are bonded to the casting. Clay brick is known for its better thermal cycling and gives a mellower heat even though it may be the same temperature. Because of this extra step in the manufacturing process, the brick versions are more expensive but nevertheless nod to the original bakery ovens that every community had that were hand made in brick by specialist oven builders.

Nowadays it is possible to have the build quality of a hand made brick oven in sectional form making it much faster to install.

Size– The size of a pizza oven is not crucial to its function if the chef can only cook one or two pizzas at a time. In commercial environments with limited space, a compact oven that fits on a counter or in a corner is often sufficient. The number of pizzas that can be cooked simultaneously depends on the oven temperature and the chef’s ability to manage them. While a larger oven can reach higher temperatures, it may still only cook one pizza at a time unless the temperature is lowered.

Lower temperatures allow for longer cooking times and the ability to cook multiple pizzas simultaneously, which is especially important when groups of friends want their pizzas served together in cafes or pubs.

In a domestic situation, either built in the house or the garden, the oven size is usually decided by budget and the experience of the person making and cooking. It doesn’t make any sense cooking in a 120cm diameter oven for that one time in the year when you have a pizza party as most people are happy to share pizzas or wait patiently. Larger size means more wood heating it up so a balance is struck between ambition and affordability.

For the most part, domestic customers only need a 700 or 800mm internal diameter pizza oven with a few going up to 950mm, our largest domestic size.

Although the materials used are the same, the commercial world needs a range of sizes and orientations that make life a little simpler. Our 950 oven say is available not only as a round 950mm diameter oven but is available in larger sizes by using interleaves that extend the length in increments or 22, 33 or 44cm . Similarly, our 1400mm round oven is extendable by adding one or more dome caps hung from steel frames so the oven wall sections rest on the dome caps enabling very large ovens with low vaults like old brick bakery ovens.

We also do a lateral oven, one that is wider than deep as a FT1350 and FT1500 so around 950mm front to back internally but 1350 or 1500mm wide. The lateral oven has been hugely popular with our commercial customers as it will fit into spaces where a round oven won’t.

Longevity and guarantees – All our domestic v commercial pizza ovens are cast the same way using the same materials so theoretically last the same amount of time. So confident are the manufacturers Four Grand-Mere of their build quality that they offer a 10 year guarantee on the domestic range. Obviously the one thing that goes in their favour is that they are probably not used every day and this is the main difference between an oven that is occasionally used and one that that is being hammered by high heat all the time, all day every day.

The commercial ovens are used and abused , with chefs throwing logs in and making the fire in the same place day in day out. This means a lot of wear and tear on very particular areas like the hearth and tiles break down eventually and crack or start pitting. The use of the oven is completely out of our control, no matter what we suggest that may improve its lifespan. We offer a year guarantee on the commercial range but if used properly, the ovens will last at least a generation if not two! Fear not, spare tiles are available even though access through the front arch may be restricted to replace those broken or work out.

I hope that gives a brief overview of the domestic v commercial pizza oven debate but if you have any specific questions please email us or fill in the enquiry form on the website and I’ll do my best to answer them.

CHOOSING BUYING PIZZA OVENS-A GOOD GUIDE

Slow cooking, Fast cooking- mastering the slow, slow quick quick slow dance

For those of you who are familiar with the Ballroom, you’ll know this is the Foxtrot or the faster paced Quickstep. What has that to do with wood fired ovens I hear you say! Well ultimately, it is to do with the amount of energy you put into an activity, the Foxtrot can be as slow as you like remember and the Quickstep as fast as you feel comfortable with.

The wood fired oven is a tool that enables both types of ‘dance’ depending where you’re at in the heat cycle. With high mass ovens, you start slow by building the fire and letting the heat soak into the fabric of the oven. You can’t do much at this stage except tend the fire and make sure there’s enough fuel distributed to really penetrate the mass of the oven. You might have a drink and nibbles on the go while you wait, chatting with friends or popping in and out prepping your food in your own time.

An hour later you then have a raging furnace to deal with so once you’ve swept the hearth and piled your embers to one side, everything starts to speed up. The dome is nicely clear of soot, your food nicely prepped ( remember ‘mis en place’ , everything in its right place) and you’re ready to go. Forget chatting or drinking, your work is now focussed on not burning the food you’ve lovingly prepared!

Mastering the Slow Slow quick quick Slow dance: Ballroom Dancing & Wood Fired Oven

Measure the temperature, is it too hot or not hot enough, is it even throughout the dome and hearth, does it need time to even itself out- impatience kicks in- ‘I want to cook NOW’ ….Part of you knows that your dance partner isn’t ready for you but you set off anyway…wait I’m out of step and its not working! The pizza burned or the base is soggy….Ok stop and wait, take stock and slow it down….temperature has evened out, its a good 350-400C or hotter on the dome, hovering around 300C on the hearth, its good to go…your dance partner is ready!

This is pizza , slow fire, slow prep, then fast cooking and fast action, slow plating- the dance is complete and now you can sit and talk….no wait there’s 4 others to feed….by the time you’ve sat down with your own food, the others have finished theirs and now watch you eat. Pats on the back and raised glasses…everyone I guarantee will say ” that’s the best pizza I’ve ever tasted” , you feel all warm inside at a job well done , the dance is over and now you can relax.

Or can you….but there’s all that heat still in the oven, I should do some bread with the left over dough balls but its still a bit hot. Maybe flatbreads for tomorrow, yes they’ll make great pocket sandwiches.

Of course it needn’t be pizza to start with, steak and fish steaks are great cooked at high temperature but unless you’ve already cooked the veg, you could throw in a baking tray of potatoes or mixed veg and cover it so it doesn’t cook too quickly. Or maybe be healthy and have a big salad instead. And what to do with the falling heat over the next few hours or overnight? Slow cooked casseroles , smoked food, slow roasts, the list is sort of endless and depends on your organisational skills and ability to prepare in advance.

At least you have the option, if you really don’t want to cook anymore, is to rake out the fire and load the embers into a firepit , chuck on a few logs and sit around while the sun goes down. I nearly always did that and still do when I have friends round.

Wood Fired Permaculture cooking

During the lockdowns of 2020/21 we did quite a few projects for individuals and small companies setting up ‘sustainable’ lifestyles, either retreats to gain new experiences and skills or people just wanting to get away from the perceived coming of the Zombie Apocalypse!

We met some lovely people on the way, people determined to make a difference and show how other lifestyles were possible ( see West Lexham https://westlexham.org.) What has come out of the last two years is that people are realising that the food system we have is broken, farmers are going out of business and consumers pay an enormous price for supermarket convenience food and the soils on which all rely are poisoned, washing away or over-fertilised.

There is another way and its called Permaculture– integrated, zero waste or closed loop agriculture where reduction in energy inputs is made possible by recycling waste generated within the system and put to good use by another input.  The most well known example is converting green waste into compost that feeds and enlivens our soils.

One of the Grandfathers of Permaculture, Bill Mollison, actually grew up in Australia but developed his ideas in the Tropics where plants grow without seasons and even repeat crop throughout the year. Steady temperatures and high humidity have their own challenges as ecosystems continually recycle waste very quickly whereas those of us in temperate Northern Europe know very well everything needs a bit more coaxing to succeed! He wasn’t a great fan of Vegetarians or Vegans as he believed passionately that human evolution required us to have animal proteins and fats to survive in periods of crop scarcity.

Not only that, animals are part of sustainable farming practices and where none exist, replacements have to be found to clear ground and eat pests. The tropics heat means preserving food by drying or fermenting is very important for those without access to expensive fridges so all those proteins and nutrients are made more easily available. The last 10 years has seen an explosion of books on Fermentation, and very important it is too for those wanting to realise foods potential for safe storage and maximum nutritional benefit.

For Permaculture cooking, wood is ultimately a sustainable carbon neutral resource and fuel, especially when you can grow it yourself. Even in temperate climates wood grows quickly for about 7-8 months of the year, roughly end of March to end of October and anybody who has seen old coppiced woods growing will know some species like Hazel and Ash grow a good metre a season. They sequester carbon in their growing cycle and release it when burnt. Despite its bad press in cities, where poor fuel quality can mean poor combustion, it remains the best fuel for cooking and heating.

If you’ve travelled around rural France or rural northern Europe, you will see huge piles of split logs seasoning for use over winter, where the use of super efficient wood burners and masonry heaters is common and the costs of electricity and gas high.

Masonry heaters ( see Tulikivi amongst others) are peculiar to Northern Europe and are designed to get the most heat out of wood fuel, burning hot and fast and using masonry to absorb as much energy as possible before the flue gases escape. Some larger ones feature heat exchangers for central heating and bread ovens that are heated at the same time as the masonry, giving you a hot oven almost 24 hrs a day, perfect for impromptu baking and heating at virtually no cost!

Cooking with home grown wood has got to be the best closed loop there is so cooking in your own wood-fired range or pizza oven ( Four Grand-Mere naturally!) has to be a go to solution if you’re thinking about de-camping to the wilds or even trying to close loops within your own patch of ground. As you may read in other posts of mine, cob ovens are a good way to get started if clay and straw are locally available and you can build under cover to keep the rain out.

Otherwise, building with firebrick or getting a modular oven in place are all great alternatives and will set you on a path of resilience, not dependent on fossil fuels for energy inputs.

Remember, when I mean home grown, I mean anything dry and a hardwood- it could be prunings from garden trees and hedges, dry untreated hardwood pallets, off cuts from woodworking, really anything as long as its dry! Permaculture cooking is here to stay………

AUTHENTIC PIZZA, the myth……

When we started our business in 2008, it grew organically out of a landscape design and build company that I had run for over 20 years. We had moved from London, somewhere I knew like the back of my hand, to near the old market town of Bradford on Avon where I knew no-one. It was hard work getting to know new people but the hamlet where we ended up gave us some solace, most were ex Londoners who had already made the precarious jump some 20 years before us.

We carried round our ‘London-ness’ like a badge of honour. I’m not a Cockney by any stretch but I do have a London lilt growing up in Essex/East London suburbs and living for the most part after I had left home in South east London. Local blokes took the piss, ‘awwhite mate’ they would say in pure EastEnder, I shrugged and laughed and said ‘Arrr fairrr to middlin’ in faux west country.

My point is we take our authenticity round with us as if we weren’t anything ‘true’ unless we did. The true answer is we are a whole load of different traditions and my own is a case in point. I’m half Indian and half English, half middle class Indian half poor working class South East London. A lot of people with similar mixed backgrounds choose their identity and go with one or the other only to get confused later on.

That confusion never goes away but thankfully, apart from the racist bigots who constantly remind you of what THEY think you are, most people are very accepting of ‘differentness’ and are fine with it.

AUTHENTIC PIZZA or just pizza

In 2008, all I saw was Neapolitan style ‘authentic pizza’ being pushed in the wood fired oven market, how to cook it at home in your own ‘authentic’ wood fired pizza oven at 500C. Companies like Forno Bravo had staked their business model on it and I duly bought from them and sold their ovens to my smattering of nervous customers. They had bought into a tradition and were happy.

I had travelled a good part of Italy in my 20’s and 30’s and knew that other pizza existed, the bready chewy pizza of Sicily, the rolled out thin pizza in Rome, the deep fried pizza fritta in parts of Naples, the focaccia style of the North. Pizza was supposed to have been ‘invented’ in Naples and they hold on to their tradition by law, the ‘ Disciplinare’, rules for making and cooking pizza that is protected by VPN, Vera Pizza Napoletana. The water, the flour and rising times are defined to give that unmistakeable spotty charred puffed ‘cornicione’ or crust created when cooking at around 500C.

The reality is Italy has only been a unified country since Risorgimento in 1871 and all the multi cultural peoples who have loved and worked and travelled around the former disparate states finally found they had all been unified into one country. All their combined traditions fed into what is now ‘authentic’. I despair but completely understand these hankerings for rules.

Jump to 2021, a lot has changed, pizza has travelled the world, the VPN still exists but the first thing I’m asked when a customer makes contact is “can I make a Neapolitan pizza at 500C in one of your ovens”.

Yes of course you can if that’s what you want to do BUT don’t get hung up on it. Customers see ‘authentic’ Neapolitan wood fired ovens online, with round dome and external smoke hood usually with mosaic or tiles and think they’ve got to have the same oven to reproduce the same style of cooking.

Well yes if you’re in Naples, maybe you have to, but rules are there to be broken and the new generation of chefs running restaurants are pushing the definition……..Check out fine dining restaurants like I Tigli in Verona and you’ll see where the pizza ‘tasting’ trend is heading and Trapizzino, pushing pizza back to its street food origins in Rome, Milan and now NYC.

Most good quality wood-fired ovens  like our own Four Grand-Mere wood fired or gas ovens will cook a Neapolitan pizza because its only part of the story. The dough and how its prepared is also very important; the proofing time and temperature, quality of flour and its protein content whether you add olive oil and even the pH of the water you use.

The reality of actual commercial restaurant pizza making at 500C is that the pizzaiolo has very little time to cook more than one at a time as it will cook so fast that it has to be kept moving if its not to burn. Run the oven at 400C there is a fighting chance you can cook 2-3, at 350-375C maybe 5-6. The result will be exactly the same but when you’ve got large table groups to feed, cooking 5-6 may be a necessity.

The trend is for change. Like the Neapolitans before, keep some traditions alive but try new forms. The pizza as we know it won’t be going away but chefs are now rediscovering new flavours and food combinations that were previously thought of as heresy. Keep the ingredients the best quality you can afford, organic and fresh if possible and you’ll be rewarded with your own take on a little slice of Italy!

Mobile catering and brilliant 5☆ pizza!

We get a lot of enquiries from catering companies hoping to set up a mobile pizza business in order to cash in on a still growing market for wood-fired pizza at weddings, festivals and public spaces without having the set up costs of a permanent restaurant.

Van or Trailer?

Mobile catering set ups need a van or at least a powerful enough vehicle to pull a heavy trailer so you’ve got to choose between having your whole set up in a van with a pop up side or using the van as a store for all the equipment you need and having a separate trailer with your pizza oven on or in it.

“When I left school, I worked for a market trader who had a small shop on Walthamstow’s Hoe Street market in East London and we had to load his box trailer every saturday and sunday to work Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire and Wembley in West London.

It was hard work loading everything we needed: all the stock, boxes of shoes, display racks and even a carpet for punters to walk on in comfort. Loaded early, taken to the market, unloaded and set up, knocked down at the end of the day and then back to the shop to unload again.”

Mobile catering is sort of the same, except for the unloading of stock. Instead you’ll be unloading a gazebo ( pretty essential given the weather), prep tables, menu boards, saladiers ( for holding your ingredients) and some sort of cash machine. On top of that, a portable fridge, a container for fresh water for cleaning up and washing hands, storage for the dough trays, tools and logs, possibly some lights and then you’ve got to power it all with a clean running generator.

Continue reading →

Bakery oven – the possibilities are endless with Four Grand-Mere

Above you can see a bakery oven we built at Farnham Pottery in Surrey, artfully shot in sepia tone to make it look timeless. The installation is on our project page tab here and shows a brick clad Four Grand-Mere F1500 brick oven designed to look like one of the original brick bottle kilns that have survived on site. It is small by bakery oven standards, only 1500Lx950W but as a community enterprise, our brief was people should find it easy to use and not hard to fill on a single bake.

Bakery ovens were traditionally of fixed hearth design, where a fire would be set on the hearth and kept going until the mass of the oven was charged with heat. Once swept and cleaned of all embers, the baker could then load the proofing loaves into the oven when happy that the heat was stable enough to bake.

The problem with this style of baking is that the baking loaves would draw heat from the mass of the oven and leave the baker no option but to eventually fire up the oven again, effectively stopping the bakers output.

The solution was found with the advent of the ‘Gueulard’ oven, a clever innovation where the heat was generated from burning wood in a separate firebox, usually under the hearth but occasionally to the side and the hot flames would enter the oven via a cast iron tube called a gueulard . This enabled the baker to keep the temperature up without stopping baking so increasing the output if there was the demand. Here is a quick video of a gueulard in operation…..

The limitations of this method are small but if the bakers demand is high, as in wholesale baking, then the next logical step is to have a rotating hearth so that loaves can be loaded and unloaded continuously as each baking period ends- load new loaves in as baked loaves come out.

Continue reading →

Pizza oven with two entry arches!

One of the exciting things about working with Four Grand-Mere as an oven manufacturer is the innovations and variations on themes they come up with. Take for instance the Campagnard 800mm internal diameter wood-fired oven- it can come in standard dome height, raised dome height, in brick or chamotte but did you know it can also come in a variation with two entry arches!

Why would I need an oven with two entry arches I hear you ask……consider the situation where you have two rooms adjoining each other, one inside the house, the other an outdoor room attached to the same wall.

Or perhaps just an outside wall of a house where you want one entrance in the kitchen and the other outside or maybe a restaurant where you’d like the customers to see the flames and what your cooking facing the seating rather than the kitchen.

Why doesn’t the heat built up from firing just disappear out of the other entrance? In the examples above the other entrance is shut off with an insulated door or a heat-stable glass door.

Four Grand-Mere make 3 variations- 90°  180° or 135° with the 90 and 135 facing left or right.

Many thanks to Chris and family in Fowey for permission to post the photos to the gallery below. We sold this oven in 2017 and have only got the photos sent over in the last few weeks! Chris installed the oven himself and we think he’s made a great job of it!

Hopefully it will inspire you that anything is possible with Four Grand-mere- we have seen one of our large commercial ovens with two entrances in France, one for the chef the other with a glass panel so customers can watch the cooking.

see these variations as tech sheets-

On the commercial side, we have installed a huge 2100 x1400mm pizza cum bakery oven in Frome, Somerset for Rye Bakery near the station. This large oven has one 50cm door inside the bakery where the pizzas are made and another at 90 degrees outside on the terrace so the customers can peek inside to see their pizza cooking. Its a hugely popular place to eat or get a take away and regularly cooks over 200 pizzas an evening.

The door outside is also right above the wood store so logs can be loaded directly without interrupting the cooking at the front inside the bakery. Because of its size, the oven has not only two doors but also two linked flue outlets so smoke can be carried away safely either side, this bends away under the roof canopy and out one end so any smoke is carried away at a high level.

We will talk through the construction details with you on ordering but bear in mind that when passing through any masonry no weight should bear on the oven itself. Walls should be supported by lintels and adequate expansion room round the oven should be built in. We did this on a small oven we did in Stonehouse near Stroud where the customer with a listed 18thC canal side house wanted an oven facing both into his kitchen and onto the terrace outside.

making pizza in the house

view of house side

outdoor room oven door

view of inside and out

pizza by the oven

dinner in the outdoor room

inside the brick oven