Fireplace butler at Taj has some hot little secrets

The season of fire is almost over. Soon, guests will cease summoning Matthew Ryan to their rooms in the middle of the night. Soon they will stop calling him the fireplace butler.

Ryan, 26, will go back to being just an ordinary shift mechanic, and that's just fine with him.

It's not that Ryan doesn't enjoy the work. He does. He likes lighting fires in the fireplaces of guest rooms at the Taj Boston, formerly the Ritz-Carlton, overlooking the Public Garden.

He can talk at length about the differences between burning birch and maple, cherry and oak. He likes mingling with the guests in the 43 suites that have fireplaces and, most importantly, he's really good at building a fire.

But Ryan's just as happy -- if not happier -- fixing a leaky faucet or fiddling with electric circuits. When the fire season ends -- officially around the first week of April -- he can go back to working behind the scenes and without that fancy title -- the fireplace butler.

Ryan, an Everett native and South Boston resident, has never even lived in a home that had a fireplace, much less a world where anyone called anyone a butler. He's unassuming and modest. And he prefers his charcoal-gray mechanic's uniform shirt to the crisp white dress shirt that fireplace butlers have to wear at the Taj.

But the biggest reason why he's looking forward to the end of fire season is a reason that every Bostonian can understand: It means the beginning of spring.

"It's time," he says, "to end the fires."

The corner suites at the Taj Boston have had fireplaces since the hotel first opened as the Ritz-Carlton in 1927. For the better part of the hotel's first 75 years, housekeepers lighted fires at the request of the guests, said Maureen Albright , the Taj's director of engineering.

But in 2002, that changed. The hotel decided to make the routine more of an event. The 14 employees in the engineering department and a handful of others were trained to light fires according to the hotel's specifications. A firewood menu was printed , and guests were given options.

They could request birch wood (it burns fast) or cherry (it's fragrant and burns slowly). They could ask for oak (a light-scented, long-burning wood) or maple (a wood that, according to the firewood menu, "evokes the essence of New England"). Or they could request a combination of the four.

Everyone has their favorite. Albright says guests will sometimes call the hotel, asking what wood they had used during their stay so they can try to replicate it at home. And some ask Albright to send them the "Taj blend," a precise mix of the woods that hotel employees won't reveal but will ship to guests upon request.

"It's just part of the season," says Ryan, who started working at the hotel two years ago. "If you've got a room with a fireplace, how can you not have it lit if it's snowing outside? It's beautiful."

Called to duty in a fourth-floor Taj suite recently, Ryan kneels down to begin the process of building a fire. He uses two logs as the base, as well as a small starter log ("You kind of cheat a little bit," Ryan admits).

Then he piles two more logs on top, spaces them evenly, stuffs wads of crumpled newspaper beneath the grate of the fireplace, and finally lights a match.

The trick, he says, is leaving plenty of room between the logs to let the fire breathe. But he won't reveal his other secrets. If he did, he says, every hotel in Boston might put in fireplaces and hire people to build the perfect fires.

No, he'll keep his secrets to himself. Ryan may not embrace his fine title. But he takes pride in what he does. For better or for worse, he is the fireplace butler -- at least for a few more weeks.

Got a subject to suggest for Heart of the City? E-mail Keith O'Brien at kobrien@globe.com.