I have actually seen it done all three ways in a room with a cathedral ceiling, standard height fireplace looks better in a smaller room so that the distance from the mantle to the ceiling looks more impressive, thus bigger. A huge room on the other hand would look out of scale if the fireplace was standard height, to the ceiling fireplace actually looks best in a very large room. I'm guessing your room is somewhere in the middle size wise so a fireplace going up 9 feet is not a bad idea, it splits the difference more or less. It's important for design esthetics that your fireplace be in scale to the room. If the fireplace is larger than the rest of the scale of the room, it will look odd. If you have a question about the design of the room, don't hesitate to ask the designer/builder why he/she is designing the room that way

I simply thought that it was a mistake/error in the system when we were picking out options. standard is to have the 9' ceiling. So naturally, the option was to have the fireplace to extend 9' high. However, since we opted to get the cathedral ceilings, the fireplace option still just listed as 9'. I'm going to find out tomorrow but I just wanted some input from people to see if it was either/or scenario (as in either standard or up the ceiling). Today, someone told me from the builder that it may just be a little thing in the system where if you get cathedral ceilings, AND the height increase of the fireplace, the stone should be going up to the ceiling... We'll see...

sigh...

Mike

IMHO it should either stop at the mantel or go all the way to the ceiling. Stopping it in the middle of the wall just looks funny. The origin of having the stone or brick go all the way up was when there was an actual chimney structure. So stopping it in the middle makes it look really artificial. You say you have a cathedral ceiling, are you sure that isn't where the ceiling starts to go up so that it's still a nine foot wall?