The grain is more noticeable than I expected.  I was hoping for a charcoal grey, which it is, but the grain has white in it, which I wish was a little more subtle.  In any case, this thing is heavy and solid.  It takes two people to put it together, but it was easier to put together than the Payan End Table I also ordered and put together the same afternoon.  The dreaded sticker on the front glass that people have written tomes about in the reviews has been replaced with a plastic decal that peels right off!  However there are still stickers visible on the inside pieces of the side shelving that defy removal.  They atomize into tiny bits, so I'm going to have to resort to goo gone once I recover from the trauma of assembling two challenging pieces in one day.  The fire looks pretty real to me on the lowest setting.  At high setting, it loses some of it's subtlety and instead looks the "fire" a community theater might devise for one of their productions.