I have a Capital range. You can get a 4 burner 30" for $3000, but not with self-clean. I assume you have a gas line already in place and just need a connection? You'd have to ask the plumber if he does gas lines, I don't believe all do. Mine was delivered to my garage and later hooked up by the furnace guy and my GC. Selectappliance.com has a 30" bluestar for $3172, free shipping. There are lots of blue star fans around here.

Try to look at a Capital hood before you buy one. The interior geometry is shallow and the styling of the lamps is high key. It's the first thing people will see in your kitchen. I believe that steeply angled baffles exhaust the smoke with less airflow than a flat underside. If you get a 54" hood with 1200cfm airflow the velocity will be low and drafts may blow the plume away from the hood. The dealer that sold me a 24" BS stove had a Capital 24" hood with built in blower for sale for $285. A customer had canceled an order and the dealer couldn't return it. I decided to buy a 30" BS hood for $1400 plus a BS roof blower for $750. I never heard the Capital blower but the looks alone dissuaded me. Early in the renovation I visited a local Ferguson's which has several installed high end hoods with built in blowers. I remember Miele, Wolf, maybe Viking and DCS. They all sounded wretched. Tinny, buzzy and shrill. That taught me that I would be getting a roof blower to get it out of the house. Unless you installation is simpler than mine your total cost will be several times the price of the hood so I'd choose carefully.

Several points: 1) Higher cfm will not make up entirely for decreased capture area. I think of blower performance as what determines how quickly smoke etc. that has been captured by the hood can be evacuated. Inadequate cfm means the hood will not clear fast enough to "make room" for incoming smoke, thus leading to spillover. However, an overly small capture area means that some smoke will never enter the hood at all. Remember that smoke diffuses laterally as it rises, and that is compounded if there is any cross-current of room air. As a first approximation, smoke that drifts laterally beyond the edge of your hood is lost no matter how high the cfm rating is. Kind of like trying to go faster on an icy road by installing a bigger engine, when the limiting factor is the spinning tires. Re haus proud's comments: all of the major hood manufacturers other than VAH allow remote blower installation. In the case of the OP, though, it sounds like he/she is venting through a side wall. That eliminates possibility of using a blower mounted inside. Only remote option would be to mount an external fan on the side of the house, which on the first floor of a house would look pretty weird. "Air intake surface covering entire underside of hood"? Isn't that all of them, except for some of the "Euro-style" hoods that have a flat piece of glass extending beyond the edges of the hood? Otherwise, the entire underside of any hood is "capture area." However, that is not related to airflow noise. That is almost all generated at the actual point where the ducting connects to the hood. "Forcing" the air through the much narrower diameter duct causes acceleration and turbulence, thus the noise. And remember that the largest duct in any standard hood is 10'', so that's pretty much fixed independent of brand. weissman: my experience differs somewhat. I have a 42'' 600 cfm VAH over a 36'' Dacor cooktop. I clearly get spillover. May reflect how I cook: I love to sear (favorite salmon recipe involves preheating dry pan on max heat for 4 minutes then dumping in fish). I'm hoping the new hood with 1200 cfm remote blower will do better over the Lacanche, and if I could, I would choose a different hood with higher cfm over the Dacor as well. Agree totally that increasing the depth from standard 24'' to 27'', or at least mounting the hood out an extra 3'' or so will partially compensate for the narrow width. amysrq: re choice of hoods--all the companies you name are good choices. As always I'll throw in a plug for Modern-Aire (Modern-Aire) with whom I've had an excellent experience. I know others have liked Metallo Arts for really wild, over the top designs. Any of these companies would make a good hood for you. I think it's more of a design decision: find one you like the looks of and you should do fine.

I thought I had just the picture, but alas, it appears to be a 36" range with 42" hood too! But I don't think it would look too different if it was 6" narrower. The key is in the scale as was mentioned above by amck. If your kitchen is large and ornate, a 30" range will look out of scale no matter the range hood style. I have an idea book of wood hoods and this first picture is my favorite! It seems to fit in well. Here are a few more that are above 30" ranges, but I can't tell for sure what the hood size is. Looks to be only 30" on these last two. Ceiling height seems to be another piece of the puzzle of getting it to look right. Too short and the hood has to jut out too abruptly to reach the proper depth above your range. (If I remember right, you have nice high ceilings?!) Probably the only way to be sure you won't be surprised by the end product is to mock it up with cardboard shaped and colored like your cabinets will be. Then you can experiment with scale and slope, etc. (Can you tell I have researched this subject for exactly the same reason:))