Is it silly to judge a kitchen based on the range hood?

[3d]

I judge a house by it's front door. The type of mailbox is a symbol of class.

[Janit]

A fancy kitchen that you never use is a symbol of class. A kitchen that functions according to your needs is the symbol of a serious cook. It sounds like it may be time for you to learn more about using an oven so that you can judge what features would actually make a difference for you.

[August West]

bfd, davester, janit, +1, and I have cooked for myself and others since a wee lad.

[mattkime]

davester wrote: If this is so, why would you be concerned about whether it has a piece of hardware that would cost at most a thousand bucks to have installed? Perhaps I don't understand the situation.

I'm just trying to verify my thoughts against those of others. Obviously I wouldn't get hung up on a feature that could get resolved for a fraction of the total purchase.

[mrbigstuff]

Yes, it is silly. A real kitchen should only be judged on granite countertops. And then you could get into color and striation.

[Carm]

mrbigstuff wrote:
Yes, it is silly. A real kitchen should only be judged on granite countertops. And then you could get into color and striation.

You forgot the backsplash and if it compliments the granite, floors and wall color.

[Winston]

Our kitchen has a skylight above an island stove. My wife didn't want a hood hanging down, so we have a vent fan in the well below the skylight, as well as a surface vent in the island. Neither work particularly well, but are better than nothing. I do like the idea of getting cooking odors out of the house. I still tend to look at vent hoods when in a store that sells them.

We put a heat detector in the kitchen ceiling, having grown up visiting a summer place that had a smoke detector too close to the kitchen.

I'm also somewhat mystified by non-vented stove hoods. They must help some, but strike me as a poor compromise. All the ones I've seen instructions for (three in total) can be plumbed to the outside, but were not because they were located on an interior wall.


I've found that I can adapt my cooking to pretty much any kitchen. And for that matter, different pots cook the same thing differently. An early apartment had a two burner cooktop with solid iron hobs, and no oven. I had a small dutch oven which I learned to use.

Our house has had a 24" flat glass electric cooktop for 30+ years. Slow to heat up and slow to cool down, but fairly precise. It's a split system, with controls for the cooktop in the separate oven below. Only one like this I've ever seen, although there are some commercial single-burner induction cooktops which use a similar setup. (The cooktop had an option for a separate control panel if you didn't get the matching oven.) The result is that the 24" cooktop functions like a larger one, as no space is wasted on controls. And we have a flat countertop, except for the slightly raised frame on the cooktop. Extremely easy to keep clean.

The matched oven has convection feature (which stopped working for years, then mysteriously worked again the last time we tried it), adding another way of cooking.


As to the gist of the original question, if I were house shopping, I'd be looking for both a functional kitchen, and one that made me feel good being in it. I spend a lot of time in our kitchen, and both usability and aesthetics are important to me. No one specific feature overrides, but I do like the durability and heat resistance of granite countertops. (But some types of granite stain easily, while other don't.)


Good luck.

- Winston

[Lemon Drop]

mattkime wrote:
My wife and I are house shopping and I'd like to have a range hood. (definitely not a dealbreaker though) In part, this might be due to my cooking technique - there's no substitute for HEAT when its called for.

The range and stove need to be able to make heat but aside from that the oven is more a symbol of class than anything else. Agreed?

I think we do the same type of cooking - high temp wok sauteing, pan frying, blackening, grilling, stuff that creates smoke sometimes. I'm no stranger to setting off the smoke alarm before dinner.
There are a lot of good venting options, not just range hoods. My newly renovated kitchen has an over-the-range microwave and the venting system is under the microwave and out of sight. It works very well with my gas burner/grill cooktop that produces high heat. Gets the smoke and steam out of the kitchen very quickly.

Good rundown of options here:
https://www.pcrichard.com/library/blogAr...00177.pcra