How to Choose a Luxury Range (Stove) for the High End Kitchen

The kitchen is the sexiest room in the house.  If you have a mediocre house with a killer kitchen, that house will be the envy of most of your friends.  A beautiful kitchen is a promise of intimate dinners, parties with friends, cozy Saturdays making cookies with the kids.  

Designing a beautiful kitchen is more than measuring square footage or deciding between brushed nickel and stainless steel.  A beautiful kitchen is made up of components.  And there is no single more important component of a beautiful kitchen, than a beautiful stove.  

With stoves, beauty must be way more than just skin deep.  That baby has to work.  You might be the creative genius chef, but she has to be the steadfast, trouble free, labor-friendly first assistant who never messes up.  She can't flare, or wimp out, or have doors that fall open, and she sure can't take a half hour to heat a huge pot of water, or refuse to provide at least 17,000 BTU's for that flawless stir fry.  Conversely, even if you never melt chocolate in your entire life, she has to be ready in case you decide you want to, or in case you sell your house to someone who does.

So what are you looking for?  Open burners, or closed?  Do the oven walls come out for easy cleaning, or do you want self cleaning?  Do you care if there's a window so you can watch your cake rise in the oven?  How about dual fuel, as in, gas burners but electric ovens?  Are you interested in a combination convection, steam, broiler, conventional oven?  How about a French burner?  

When you first commit to such a purchase you need to pick a price point.  High end stoves begin with a modest price point of about $5,000 for an American stove, and go up, up, and up to over $40,000 from there.  

Most people with high end budgets opt for Viking or Wolf.  These are the biggest sellers in the over $7,000 category.  They are both excellent American-made choices in this price range.  Wolf is a stainless steel product with a beautiful while understated and classy exterior.  The surprise comes with a wonderful cobalt blue interior and optional lipstick red knobs.  The grates glide impeccably.  Viking comes in stainless steel but also offers a surprising variety of exterior colors.  Consumers in the midwestern part of the United States are more likely to buy Wolf, while on the west coast they will more likely choose Viking.  This regional taste partially depends on availability of distributors and maintenance support.  Other popular higher-end options include easily researchable ranges like Dacor or Jenn-air, even more common brands such as GE Profile and Electrolux. 

Maintenance support is one of the most important factors when choosing a range.  If you're interested in a product, especially if you're spending a significant part of your budget, you want to have numbers to support the wisdom of your decision.  But when it comes to buying high end ranges, it's not so easy to get those numbers. Wolf and Viking are the easiest to investigate because they are sold in appliance stores everywhere, and represented by knowledgeable sales staff who can call someone if they don't have an answer right away. Consumers websites on-line also offer support, information, 1-800 numbers, and other options for information gathering.  

But when you think you might be interested in something other than Viking or Wolf, you're entering territory that is somewhat murkier.  Where, for instance, do you get unbiased information, untainted by the seller's or manufacturer's websites, for products like La Cornue or La Cornufe, La Canche, Bertazzoni, Five Star, Elmira, or any of the lesser known brands?

One thing you can do is call the seller and request the phone number for the local company that will maintain the product you select.  The product is covered by the manufacturer's warrantee.  Talk to the maintenance company and have a conversation.  How often do they service this product?  What do they think of it?  What other brands of this type of product do they service?  How does this product compare?  Would the service company repairman recommend this product?  You will learn a lot, and most especially, you'll learn if you like what you hear, or not.

There are also product showrooms.  These showrooms are either in design centers in major metropolitan areas, or you can seek out a showroom by doing an on-line search and inputting the name of the brand you're looking for.  If it's a reasonably good showroom, you'll be able to see the range in person, matched to a variety of hoods (which you will most definitely need and which is an additional expense) and in a variety of design settings.  With these sorts of design centers, the 'rule' is you either have to come in with a designer, or you may call ahead and make an appointment.  However experience has shown that if you just walk in, they'll ask you if you have an appointment, but if you don't, they won't throw you out if you just want to walk around.  

La Cornue and La Cornufe is rarely featured in a showroom, and there are not too many showrooms that offer examples of La Canche.  La Cornue is an exquisitely hand-made French product but is represented in the United States by Purcell Murray, which is in California.  There, the $40,000+ La Cornue idea is transformed into La Cornufe, price point $8,000, still just beautiful, but not hand made, and available here through Williams-Sonoma.  

Although owning a beautiful range in a beautiful kitchen is wonderful, and fun, it's also a lot of fun to explore the possibilities prior to making a decision.  Searching for the perfect kitchen range is an opportunity to learn a lot about options most people didn't even know existed.