Nye installs wood burning stoves across London through his work with Stoake, moving between Victorian terraced houses, community spaces and, at times, more unexpected settings such as galleries. His relationship with fire goes back further. After moving to Australia as a child, he grew up in a culture where fire was part of everyday life, through barbecues, gathering and outdoor cooking, but also something that demanded care. That early awareness carries through into his work today. He speaks not only about the practicalities of installation, but about the enduring place of fire in the home, the appeal of wood burning stoves as a carbon neutral heat source, and the advances in stove technology that have made them strikingly simple to use.
Do you have any childhood memories of being around a stove or fire?
I always loved fire growing up. My parents came over from India in the 1970s, and we did not have a fire in the house. But when I was a little older, we moved to Australia, where barbecues were a big part of life, so there was always a fire going, with people gathered around it and all that came with it. In Australia there is also a strong awareness of fire in another sense, and of the need to treat it with care.
After school, I started work as a gas fitter and, through working with other renewable technologies, found my way to boiler stoves and then wood burners.
Day to day, what do you find most interesting about the different places and projects you install stoves for? 
One of the great things about working in London is meeting so many environmentally conscious people, particularly because everyone lives so closely together. People want to use the right stoves and make sure they are properly maintained. The work takes us into all sorts of homes and buildings, most often Victorian terraced houses, and every project has its own character. You might be working in a family sitting room one day, then in a completely different kind of space, such as a community farm, the next.
Your work has also taken you into unexpected places, including installing stoves for exhibitions at White Cube. What was it like bringing the element of fire into a contemporary gallery setting?
We installed six stoves for the artist Danh Vo at White Cube in Bermondsey. They were six Skye 7s, all connected to a single terminal and flued together, which is not something you would normally do in a domestic setting. Because it was a temporary exhibition in an industrial space, Building Regulations did not apply in the same way they usually would. Seeing all six running together in a white gallery space was quite something. It was a very different context for a stove, and a fascinating project to be part of.
Sitting beside a fire is such an ancient human act. Why do you think there is so much misunderstanding today about the ecological role of the modern wood burning stove?
It is such an ancient human act. A fire makes a house feel alive as well as warm, and those of us who work with stoves do not much like being in a house in winter without one. A lot of the misunderstanding comes from the way the issue has been represented in the media. There has been a tendency to blur the distinction between an open fire and a modern stove, and to simplify emissions reporting in a way that has confused people.
A modern stove, used properly, has very low emissions compared with many other sources of emissions. In reality, the picture is more nuanced. We began installing wood burning stoves because they are a carbon neutral heat source, and we have been particularly grateful for advances in technology, especially in stoves such as
the Charnwood Skye 700. Customers are genuinely interested not only in how well these stoves burn, but in how easy they are to live with. With a stove like the Skye 700, you still engage with the fire, but in a very simple way. You light it, close the door and let the stove do its job.
