Kitchen Exhaust Hoods by Miele
4 February 2010
“A Beautiful Miele”
I have read that high performing Miele exhaust hoods should be on the short list of everyone who can afford them, but when I read a statement like that I honestly find myself wondering about the priorities of those who are remodeling a kitchen. And, yes, I do understand a budget; I have one myself. But my contention is that if you are going to remodel a kitchen, it should be worth the bother. And by remodeling I mean the plan is to do more than just re-facing the cabinets or slapping on a coat of paint. I’m talking about tearing out everything that is in the kitchen and replacing it with new, a complete remodeling. So, on that basis, then, one needs a budget of, what? Well, quite a bit. I have heard of those who can do it for twenty or thirty thousand, but unless one is blessed with a cabinetmaker’s skills, I honestly don’t know how such a budget can be adhered to while still getting items that are worth the money and inconvenience of remodeling the kitchen.
There is a company that shall go nameless that has achieved quite a reputation as one where one can obtain cabinets that “are just as good” as anyone else’s while being much cheaper, but I am still of the old school. I believe you get what you pay for. But regardless of what one pays for the kitchen, I firmly believe that if the kitchen hood that is installed in the kitchen is simply one of those under-cabinet range hoods that are installed only because they can be obtained for a few hundred dollars, than an opportunity to do something dramatic with one’s kitchen shall have been lost. Because they require a six-to-eight inch vent pipe running up through the center, those cheap range hoods destroy the cabinet above for any meaningful storage space. That being the way of it, why not use that space for something glorious, a kitchen hood that is the focal point of the kitchen? And with that I can return this discussion to Miele, which is one of the finer manufacturers of kitchen appliances now going about.
The DA220-4 we’ve featured at the top of this blog is a large, curved island hood with unique double-sided blowers for extremely efficient air extraction, which is a large part of what anyone should be looking for in a hood, although my own experiences tell me that it’s pretty hard to go wrong with a hood, considered only from the air extraction standpoi
nt. Ours is both cheap and small (less than $200), but it does an adequate job. It’s pretty noisy, and it’s a lumpy-looking piece of, um, stuff that takes up all the space in the cabinet above it, but it performs its job well. Miele’s DA220-4, by way of decided contrast, is a 40″ island hood with a steel frame and sleek arched glass that instantly becomes the main attraction in your kitchen. Such exhaust hoods, as many experts put it, simply define the kitchen and the chef.
As it is with any design company worth its salt these days, but especially so with those based in Europe, Miele is far from content with a single item offered for sale. They have range hoods in every possible size and configuration and, most especially, in every kind of wonderful design imaginable. But, in the end, a hood that doesn’t do its job has no real reason for being, and these hoods certainly do theirs. Depending on the design, they have convenient front-mounted controls, delayed 5 and 15 minute shutdown programs, integrated 20-watt halogen lights, removable, dishwasher-safe metal filters and programmable filter saturation timers. Really, they have it all-brawn and beauty, a rare combination.
Joseph
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One Response to “Kitchen Exhaust Hoods by Miele”
February 8th, 2010 at 9:38 PM
LOVE Miele hoods! Good post!