Kitchens are very personal to those that use them. One cooks dream kitchen will be another cooks nightmare. Fingers crossed in two years time I will be allowed to build MY dream kitchen in our current house. Any line cook/professional chef will feel at ease here, but most people on this forum would be shocked. I am in a very unique situation where my wife has a very well paying job that means I do not have to work to put food on the table. This is not to say I could not find work, as 13 years in the Australian Army (retiring as a Major) and four years as a Finance Professional (two finance degrees, the highest a Masters) have left me with marketable skills. After moving to Dallas TX via five years in New York City, from Sydney Australia, I was looking at short courses to improve my home cooking. Not finding any courses that were of value I enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu and completed a 15 month Culinary Associates Degree in 13 months then worked in a five star restaurant for nine months. This was all to improve my home cooking. Kitchens for me are a place of work. If you want to socialize there are other rooms in the house for that. If you need to do homework, there are other rooms in the house for that. If you are in my kitchen you are cooking and/or cleaning. By their nature kitchens are hot, noisy, dangerous places. Pets and very very young children do not belong in the kitchen as they pose a risk to themselves and others, both through injury and food contamination. My kitchen will have a commercial range hood. I'm not talking 27" deep 48" wide 1,000 cfm, but a 48" deep 9' wide 2,500 cfm hood covering the entire hot cooking area. The hot cooking area will have one gas wok burner and outlets/space for two 3,500w (240v) portable induction burners, two 1,800w (110v) portable induction burners, one 240v counter top deep fryer, two immersion circulators (110v) in their water baths, and a commercial combi oven. Portable burners and the like allow flexibility in the kitchen and increase prep counter space. Most of my kitchen will be stainless steel with open shelving. It might not grace the pages of Better Homes and Garden, but it will be a bullet proof kitchen that is easy to clean. As much as possible the kitchen will be a separate room, NOT open the the main living areas. For me kitchens are food preparation areas with other rooms for food eating and socializing. A separate kitchen allows the noise, heat and smells to be contained in one room, not spread throughout the house. This kitchen will match my cooking style and methods. I hunt and have a chest freezer full of venison, rabbit and squirrel I harvested myself. The freezer also contains sub-primal cuts of animals that I buy in bulk. I much as I can I butcher and process my own meat and make sausage from scratch. I make all stocks, broths and sauces from scratch. I need large prep tables that are easy to clean to do this. While I do not consider my cooking methods cutting edge, I do own and use equipment not often seen outside professional kitchens. I cook Sous Vide for almost every meal. I use immersion circulators to cook most of my proteins and I use a vacuum chamber sealer to seal product in plastic bags. For those that have seen the five volume cookbook Modernist Cuisine, I can prepare most of those recipes with the current kitchen tools I own. My dream kitchen will allow me to cook them all. I rarely cook one pot wonders. A normal mid week meal, for just my wife and I, will be one course with a protein, sauce, two different vege and a starch. I require five separate burners to heat the food for plating - one for each item. I will/have happily spend/spent 6-8 hours a day in the kitchen for 3-4 days preparing a themed 9 course tasting meal (paired with wine) because one friend from out of town is/was coming over. I enjoy preparing, cooking, plating and serving food at home that is 5 star restaurant quality. When people ask me what do I do, I say I am a Personal Chef to my Wife. I can count on both hands the number of times per YEAR that we order take out and/or eat at a restaurant for dinner when in Dallas. A kitchen is where cooking occurs. While many people forget it, cooking is a very serious business. When you make mistakes in a kitchen, at best people go yuk and a pizza is ordered; worse case people die. To reduce the possibility of food borne illnesses, the kitchen needs to be an area that is separate from the main area of the house. It should not be a thoroughfare for the family and pets traipsing from the carport/outside/garage/etc to get to another part of the house. The materials the kitchen is made of need to be easily cleaned and sanitized. If you are scared to use a pressure washer on them, it is not the right material. My dream kitchen is most peoples nightmare. It is industrial, noisy and tight. Any aisle wider than 36" wide is too wide, any wider I would have to take a step to reach something - that is inefficient. The lighting will be bright and daylight balanced. I spend my pretty-mood-lighting-funds on the lights outside and in the great room, not the kitchen. The only view in my kitchen, other than the four walls, is the TV in one corner. The best views in the house are when you are sitting on the back deck with a cold beer in both hands, not standing at the sink washing a stack of dirty pans. A "cook's kitchen" is one where any cooking occurs. I have friends with kitchens costing $200k+ that only get used to heat precooked purchased food on Thanksgiving - I do not call this a cook's kitchen although it could be. Another friend will prepare, from scratch a 3 course plated meal for 10 in their 800 sq ft NYC studio apartment. The "kitchen" is a bar sink, 2 feet of counter space, 1 hot plate, 1 toaster oven and a dorm fridge. What constitutes a "cook's kitchen" for me is one that I am willing and happy to spend many hours a day, day after day in. For me this is commercial kitchen in a residential home.

@Moses, Bumping this thread, though it's not that old. I have two own-root Stiletto younglings (quarter-pot starter size) recently planted at the start of June. In just three weeks time, I already had a few blooms and they were exquisite. (I wish I would have taken photos, but I will next time, which will probably be soon - given new bud formation again). Although it is certainly much too early to make any solid statements about the overall performance of this rose in my scorching-hot and humidity-soaked zone 8A central Mississippi summer climate, I can in the meantime decisively confirm at least one particular quality that has surprised me: Stiletto blooms appear to last a few weeks! The petals do not fall off as the rose ages (unlike a number of roses which unremarkably "shatter" within a few day's time of unfirling). I've not noticed a SINGLE petal coming loose with Stiletto, even in full sun and after being inundated with the heavy downpour of a severe thunderstorm. Instead, the petals slowly harden off, gracefully drying out (not unlike some dried rose arrangements), and finally the entire flower head shrivels up, inevitably browns, then falls off at the node-neck break ("self cleans"). Throughout this transition, in full summer heat and scolding Sun, the rose color shifts as it ages; first, opening in a voluptuous plum-red (mostly red with hints of a violet cast, reminiscent of Santa Rosa plum skin color), then turning a more decidedly bold magenta, and ending with a provacative yet aggreeable purple at the onset of its drying out as it approaches browning. Hence, at the very least, it can be said that Stiletto demonstrates EXCEPTIONALLY stable blooms. I've not seen a rose hold on as tenaciously yet gracefully as this one [in recent memory], based upon over three dozen rose varieties currently in my collection to make that comparative assertion. Stay tuned for additional assessments to come, and some planned posted images.

Thanks Birds. Augusta Luise is not all like a typical hybrid tea. I don't know how large she'll get in SoCal, but she's a big girl here. (I live in zone 7, SW semi arid desert Idaho with hot, dry summers). My roses tend to be large. AL has a lovely, wide growth habit, is very healthy and an excellent bloomer with large fluffy blooms and a nice scent. She is near perfect, I think. Her color varies from light pink to apricots and a little darker, particularly in fall. We don't have fungal rose diseases here--too dry, so roses tend to be very healthy. She's not susceptible to any disease, but none of my roses are. I've grown her since 2013-14. She's grafted on multiflora, was bred by Evers in Germany for Tantau. I purchased her from Hortico, but that was the last year they sold her. She's hard to get. Palatine now sells her, but I think they're sold out. I hope you're able to grow her. Diane

Yes in most cases. With my New Zealand lemonade, it set flowers and new growth. The new fruit started to grow and the tree put on more leaves. It kept flowering and started dropped its developing fruits. This flowering continued and the new leaves and shoots started dyeing. More flowers bloomed and the tree started dropping the old growth leaves and branches until the tree was dead. In fall I have to trim all the flower buds off my NZL's for the tree to do well.