A wood stove, a garage and a county fair.

Travis Industries did not start under that name. It began as Lopi, a wood-stove business that Kurt Rumens started in a garage in Bellevue, Washington, according to a February 2025 feature in The Herald of Everett by Janice Podsada and Andrea Brown. The paper reported that the first Lopi model, a heavy wood stove, was sold at the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe, and that the company’s first production line ran in a warehouse in Kirkland.

The founding year is 1979. A 2010 Herald profile by Amy Rolph said Rumens founded Travis Industries in that year, and the Lopi website’s “Our Story” page carries the line “1979 – First Lopi Wood Stove.” The same 2010 article described Rumens as a New York native who began installing stoves in the Seattle area in the 1970s, before he made them himself.

The name came later. In 1988, the 2025 Herald feature reported, Lopi was sold to the Spokane manufacturer Travis Garske and became Travis Industries. Rumens stayed with the business, and he gave the paper a short account of what the sale meant: “Lopi was just a small wood stove company, Garske enabled all this.” The Lopi website’s story page still shows him with the title President & General Manager, and the 2025 article used the same title.

The Lopi name therefore does two jobs. It is the company’s original name and the brand under which it still sells wood, gas and pellet stoves and fireplace inserts, while Travis Industries is the maker’s name that sits above it and above its sister brands.

Four brands under one roof.

Travis Industries runs its business as a family of brands rather than one product line. In 2010 The Herald listed them as Lopi, Avalon, Fireplace Xtrordinair and the outdoor Tempest Torch. The current Lopi website names a different set: Lopi, it says, is a brand of Travis Industries, Inc. “along with Fireplace Xtrordinair, DaVinci Custom Fireplaces and Fire Garden,” and the 2025 Herald feature gave the same four, writing the second simply as Xtrordinair.

Each has its own name and its own website. Fireplace Xtrordinair uses the short web address fireplacex.com, which is why the brand is often written as FireplaceX; DaVinci Custom Fireplaces has its own site and is described in architectural product listings as a division of Travis Industries; Fire Garden is the outdoor line. Lopi’s website groups its range into wood, gas and pellet stoves and fireplace inserts, and names families of technology such as NexGen-Hybrid, GreenSmart and Ember-Fyre, each carrying a trademark symbol.

The way the company sells is part of its identity too. The 2010 Herald article reported that Travis sold through independent retail stores rather than big-box chains such as Home Depot or Lowe’s, in the United States, Canada and Australia, and was then extending its distribution to China. Lopi’s website points buyers to “specialty hearth retailers” and includes a “Where to Buy” finder rather than an online shop.

Rumens has talked about design in plain terms. In 2010 he told The Herald that some of his ideas came from high-end furniture stores, and he credited the business’s growth to its staff, calling it “the story of the ingenuity of a bunch of people.” In 2025 he summed up the range in five words: “We sell fire in different forms.” That year, the paper reported, the company began making a holographic electric fireplace line; Rumens said, “We didn’t invent the technology, we just applied the technology to fire.”

Hearth and air.

The brands in this group make fireplaces and ceiling fans, two kinds of product that sit at the centre of a room and are chosen as much for how they look as for what they do. Some of the names began as small workshops or family firms and still carry a founder’s name; others now belong to larger home-products or building-products groups, and a single brand can be sold through specialist showrooms, dealers and online retailers at the same time.

Because the company behind a hearth or fan brand may have changed hands, moved its offices or shifted its manufacturing, the name on the product often travels further than the business that first used it. That makes the plain questions worth asking for each one: who started it, who owns it now, and where its fireplaces or fans are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record — newspapers, trade press and official notices — from what the company says about itself, including its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its names, labels and catalogues have changed, and it marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Made in Mukilteo.

Travis Industries makes its products in Washington State. In 2003, the 2025 Herald feature reported, Travis Industries moved from Kirkland to a former Boeing plant at Harbour Pointe in Mukilteo, Washington, which it leased before buying the property. The company calls its headquarters the “House of Fire,” a name the paper used in 2010 as well as in 2025. The 2010 article reported that staff there design, test and assemble the stoves and fireplaces, and the Lopi website says its heating appliances are “designed and hand-assembled” at its factory in Mukilteo. The Lopi site also invites visitors to take a factory tour. The 2010 profile placed the plant near Paine Field, and the 2025 feature listed its output as wood stoves, pellet stoves, and natural gas and electric fireplaces.

The House of Fire name is the nearest thing the company has to a single corporate signature. Its consumer identity is split across the brand names, each with its own logo and website, while Travis Industries itself appears mainly in the small print: on the Lopi story page, in architectural listings for DaVinci and in local news coverage of the plant. The Lopi website describes Travis Industries as privately owned.

The Lopi stove brand’s own website is lopistoves.com.

For a design guide, Travis Industries shows how a maker can keep its original brand at the front of the shop while building a family of sister names behind it. Compare Jøtul, the Norwegian cast-iron stove maker, and Heat & Glo, another American hearth brand. For this guide we use charcoal, ember red and flame amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Travis Industries’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.