Thanks everyone for your input. The kitchen is not going to be modern per se, but not traditional either. One kitchen I really liked was labeled "transitional". I want things simple and clean but warm--nothing fussy, but not too sleek either. My DH calls me difficult-perhaps he's right. It's a good thing he doesn't read this forum. hollylh-thanks for the advice about the dark granite. It's certainly something I keep debating We will be having a large island and I'm considering putting a lighter granite on that surface. The problem is that I'm not finding a lighter granite that "speaks to me" that isn't a gazillion bucks. While everytime I'm at the granite place I steer towards the ubatuba, verde butterfly, verde peacock--love those dark greens. I did see a golden oak granite in some magazines that I liked-- I may have to investigate further. I also am thinking about using solartubes (kinda like skylights, only not) to bring natural light in--will have to talk with the builder about that. If anyone has any experience with these please chime in gibby3000--you probably gave me the best advice in your "gut feeling" comment. In my head I'd always pictured a stainless hood, but really liked the idea of tying the kitchen/great room together so I started thinking--and that always leads me to trouble. I went back to five of the 15+ kitchen design books/magazines I've saved and every kitchen I really liked had a stainless hood. In particular there was an arts and crafts style kitchen with medium toned cherry cabinets and floors and dark perimeter granite and "my stove" with a gigantic stainless hood. I actually went "Oooh I really like that" in my head before I realized what I was looking at--a kitchen with the feel and overall color palate I want for my kitchen. The great/terrible thing about cultivating ideas with others is you end up with something much greater than you could have on your own, but you have to remember to listen to yourself too, even if you have to back up a bit and figure that out--thanks for the reminder. One more decision decided!!! Laura

(A wall mount range hood is probably not what the OP asked for.) Mating to a 7.5 foot ceiling should not be difficult; even Wolf's large Pro Island hoods are only 18 inches high, leaving the base at 3 ft over the counter with a 7.5-foot ceiling. And higher helps the view across an island. However, unless the cooktop is only 24 inches, a 30-inch hood is too small for an island application. One needs to overlap the cooking zone on all four sides to account for rising plume expansion, and throw in a bit more size to account for cross drafts, depending on location. In any case, to say that the kitchen has a duct is far too little information. Where is the duct relative to the cooking zone, what diameter is it? Is there a blower at the other end or do you need one in the hood, etc? Can the duct be replaced?

@Dana: "I currently have a microwave above my stove top and one thing to keep in mind, it is a common source of house fire, if the small filter does not get cleaned." "Estimates can vary, but at least 90 percent of US households have a microwave. According to the National Fire Protection Association, microwaves cause 4 percent of cooking-related house fires per year (PDF) and 1 percent of associated deaths. A similar percentage of homes have a range or cooktop, yet those appliances account for 62 percent of cooking fires and a whopping 89 percent of the deaths." (Source: Why Microwaves Can Catch Fire)

Heh! Yes, mattress is a very good example. This is why ca. 2007 I started reading up on kitchen ventilation so I could ignore the magic that was being asserted and determine for myself what was needed. In a hood, most of the effectiveness is embedded in the sheetmetal shapes and the blower motor and fan. I rarely hear of fan failures (I can only recall one on this forum). Broan absorbed NuTone that used to provide a lifetime guarantee. Wolf uses Broan. If the hood exterior is non-magnetic stainless steel, it shouldn't ever rust or develop surface staining. What tends to fail in lower quality hoods are fan and light switches. These hoods may have thinner sheet metal, but that is not a point of failure. It might have a relationship with rattles. Mean time to failure with electronics will typically decrease with increased parts count. So some risk of shorter lifetime may be present where fancy motor control circuits are in use. It is fine to go shopping and look at hoods from the point of view of ease of use or lighting or construction quality, or aesthetics of design, but nothing should be purchased until you have gone through the process of understanding what you need a hood system to do and what its parameters have to be to achieve it. Since modern higher performance residential hoods for pro-style cooking equipment derive their requirements from commercial cooking ventilation, you may wish to start by downloading and reading the first dozen or so pages of the Greenheck Guide: https://www.tagengineering.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/KVSApplDesign_catalog.pdf