Wall Hoods from Best S.p.A
11 January 2012
“A Little Salesmanship”
Ours is a teeny tiny kitchen, and because of that, when it comes time to design our kitchen, I may well go with the traditional under cabinet range hood. In previous blogs I have railed about the loss of effective storage space in these cabinets caused by that monstrous six to eight inch vent pipe going up through the cabinet, but I can always take a page from my blogging partner. Joe Dusel made an awfully slick cabinet by simply putting a box around the vent pipe, thereby keeping out steam and grease and making something usable of the, admittedly, truncated space. So, that’s one concept, and if, as I suspect she will, my wife should begin maneuvering for every single scrap of kitchen storage, then that is what I will do. But, as you can clearly see by the reluctance that seeps through these sentences, that is not where my heart is.
What I would like to do is to make for us a kitchen unlike any other. And one of the ways to do that is to find a hood innovative enough to become the focal point for the kitchen. Face it, folks, that space doesn’t really come to much. Why not, instead, simply dump it altogether, and in the space then liberated, find a more innovative use for the space, while still providing the necessary kitchen ventilation?
These hoods from Best S.p.A are very much a case in point. I like them because they are both quite a bit less in size than gargantuan, and they’re innovative. The trouble with some of the other kitchen hoods I have written about is that they are entirely too big for our kitchen. It’s advice I got from Kelly Morisseau on her blog site, but, really, she’s right. Much as I love many of those oversized kitchen hoods that I have waxed ecstatic about, the plain fact of the matter is that something that size overwhelms a kitchen like ours. And if, like us, you have one of those itsy bitsy kitchens that is going to keep right on being miniscule, you would be well-advised to eschew the grandeur of an oversized behemoth designed for a kitchen three times as large. However, something like these might well be just the ticket.
Best S.p.A is another Italian-based, world-wide company, as is increasingly becoming the norm these days. All my life I’ve heard about a shrinking globe, a statement I’ve always known to be true, but, really, it’s the Internet that has most shrunk the world, and done it in just a few years. More and more, 
as it is with Best S.p.A, when I go to their website, I find that they started in Northern Italy, have their plant there, are designed and manufactured there, but are distributed throughout Europe and then across the Atlantic to these shores. Partly, it’s distribution; partly it’s the ease of communication these days, mostly; it’s a combination of the first two and products like these! The hood that tops this blog is the Equinox and the second one we show is the Fusion.
The picture at the top of this blog shows the Equinox in a kitchen without wall cabinets, which may well be the way to use a hood like this one. And suddenly the innovation compounds itself because, in this country especially, we are accustomed to wall cabinets. Perhaps the way to totally lighten up a kitchen is to get rid of the wall cabinets altogether, excepting only an occasional floor-to-ceiling cabinet at one end. But the airiness of a kitchen with only base cabinets is really quite refreshing. As for the storage space thus “lost,” well, one can always store dishes in a dining room hutch, which is an option that is definitely open to us. Now if I can just sell the wife on it!
Joseph
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One Response to “Wall Hoods from Best S.p.A”
January 11th, 2012 at 9:54 AM
Nice looking wall vents, but they do look like they would only work for special situations. They require a 150mm vent behind them. I guess that is fine if they are located on an exterior wall. I’m not sure that I like the idea of no upper cabinets in a kitchen. I did one kitchen like that for a client who built his kitchens with windows everywhere. I don’t think this guy did a whole lot of cooking. I agree with the idea that a kitchen is a workshop. I want to have everything I need right around me. I like the idea of having storage on both sides of the cooktop since I am always reaching for items I need to add to the food I am making.