I saw an episode of House Hunters International recently where they were looking for a place in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The little four burner stove had two electric burners and two gas burners. The 20 lb. gas tank was stored under the next cabinet over. The real estate agent said this was typical in Dubrovnik, and you just take the tank to the gas station and trade it out when it's empty.

Here are some more, flipped right-side-up.

I suppose it makes sense that the French like classic French ranges. I like the idea of a blackboard for backsplash, and will think about it more generally. By the way, Lacanche now has an induction range.

The integrated approach - cooktop, counter, and drawers are one piece.

A built-in steam table - cool.

Someone will like this eye candy.

boy, those are some beautiful stoves! not for someone like me tho - that'd be a lot to have for an occasional grilled cheese or egg sandwich...

I do love watching House Hunters Int'l - watching it right now. couple moving from LA USA to Australia! Melbourne. I love to see the land and homes in other countries. I 'travel' thru HH Int'l!

After a little more reading, it appears that in France you'd refer to a range as a ''piano'' if it were a high-end, largish instrument. The equivalent to a ''professional-style'' range in the USA.

Anyway, here are some French kitchen design websites:

http://www.marieclairemaison.com/,toutes-nos-cuisines-et-salles-a-manger,200043.htm
lots of nice kitchens here, from super-moderne to l'ancienne

http://www.leblogdeco.fr/category/cuisine
Modern, sleek, shiny. No so many pianos here.

http://uncourantdairdanslamaison.blogspot.com/2011/02/paris-style-kitchen-dining.html
French blogger reveling in her book about Japanese kitchens - funny

http://www.arthur-bonnet.com/Nos-cuisines
Lots of nice contemporary kitchens in the gallery

http://www.designcuisine.fr/Cuisine.php
Another kitchen designer's site - I imagine these represent what the average checkbook-wielding French kitchen-seeker is looking for

Thanks to a perfectly horrid dream that woke me up into a state of insomnia, here are some Japanese kitchen websites:

http://www.house-in.co.jp/works/
This seems to be a kitchen designer. Some cool kitchens.

http://annie-s.co.jp/?p=973
I think this is some kitchen designer service, with a completely different look.

http://www.interior-heart.com/seven-color/fengshui/kitchen.html
A feng shui site, showing what I imagine to be a more typical Japanese kitchen

http://www.arterior-n.co.jp/kitchin.cgi
I'm not sure if they sell kitchen furniture or are a design service.

I just translated ''kitchen design'' into Japanese and ran the resulting unintelligible character string through google.jp - the results were a tad random.

None of these look too much like the traditional Japanese kitchen pictures I've seen - but neither do GW kitchens look like vintage 1920's American kitchens.

Johnliu, what is TKO'd? I am slow today:)
by the way I love that blackboard as a splash back.. what a great (and inexpensive) idea.

Here's is my dear friend Stephanie's newly remodeled kitchen - she lives in Provence. The kitchen was peviously the quitessentail "French Country" (colors, fabrics, slightly rustic) but she and DH wanted it more modern, perhaps after a decade of living in the states.

boy, those are some beautiful stoves! not for someone like me tho - that'd be a lot to have for an occasional grilled cheese or egg sandwich...

I do love watching House Hunters Int'l - watching it right now. couple moving from LA USA to Australia! Melbourne. I love to see the land and homes in other countries. I 'travel' thru HH Int'l!

That is pretty neat how the dishwasher is raised up. Is that something fairly easy to do? I guess it's a trade off; no bending down to load or unload, but your countertop is broken up. What do you guys think about that?

Adrienne, I'm thinking the same thing LOL

greenhouse, TKO = totally kitchen obsessed

Some more, from Maison Francaise

This is a Mondrian-inspired kitchen - sorry for the vertigo, I just cannot get the image to rotate

And a fantastical tiled island, in a rustic/brutal Alpine chalet, all bare timbers and concrete butresses.

That island looks like it's made out of Legos. I do not like that at all.

Is that a mosaic monkey on the end of that island? I think maybe it is just the background to a large floral, but it sure looks like a monkey to me! I actually think that solid block of mosaic for an island is pretty cool. I just don't know how practical it is.

10k- Does your friend Stephanie have any before pictures? That's the type of style I'm planning...after spending too much time watching movies about Provence :)

Interesting. Would love to know who the manufacturer is on the second "piano" picture...multicompartment ovens. Any ideas?

Thanks

Adrienne and Corrie22, yes it is easy to raise a dishwasher. Just makes sure there is a solid platform under it and enough slack in the water lines and hoses. Here is mine, I just used a 24" double oven cabinet.

I am with Steph, looking at the kitchens around the world on House Hunters. It is interesting to see the difference in the kitchens in some locales where they expect to have a lot of American buyers - the resort areas in South and Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean. There are more cabinets, bigger counters. Other areas of the world often have smaller kitchens with only a few cupboards, often freestanding. Or the kitchen area is huge, but the working area is just a corner in that space. Often, the kitchen is pretty much modular and you take it with you when you go.

John,

These are fascinating! Especially that Alpine island that looks like it came out of the Oceanside Glass stylebook. :)

Other than the one you said came from a feng shui site, which also looks more like the "typical" Japanese kitchens I've seen in friends' snapshots of visiting relatives in Japan, there's a magazine shoot sameness to a lot of these. Even though there are some different appliances and, when comparing with Asia, different cooking methods, it seems like stylish kitchens are pretty much the same the world over.

The ones I find really fascinating are the experimental ones, like the Bulthaup B2 (which I have a love-hate with), the De Dietrich crescent in one of your links, and that sliding green surface island. I've seen a lot of experimental design that hasn't been brought to installation and functional prototype, and the thing I find most commonly among them is that they aren't designed by people who actually cook. The little ones, like the green thing, tend to be designed by students, with student digs in mind, and the others seem more like elevated "guy design" (not a reference to our male friends who cook and have design sense, but the average guy who doesn't ponder aesthetics at all, beyond proportional symmetry, and doesn't think of how the room will be used when planning it). I say elevated, because they seem designed by engineers who don't cook, not just run of the mill guys. There is some thought to both aesthetics and function; it's just not realistic. I really like them though! They're kind of science fiction kitchens that challenge ideas of what could be. Most, even the dorm sized ones, assume a larger installation area per functional application than is actually available. In this way, they also seem a bit ungenerous (not enough storage, etc.). But they're always interesting and different. The concept cars of kitchens.

What a great idea for a thread. I agree that when I think about my travels elsewhere and how foreign a place seems, it's the kitchens' aura that leads the sense of foreign-ness, and how that works is totally different from the kitchen-culture we have here. Course there are some non-USA folks on GW too, but I'm guessing as they're from English-speaking countries the kitchen feel is somewhat similar.

I'm really looking forward to following some of those urls. Thanks!

I can contribute some German perspective. The standard in Germany is to take your kitchen with you when you move, so most of their kitchen designs have a modular quality to them. Then there's that pervasively sleek Bauhaus influence that feels more historically "natural" in Germany, and less superimposed, than elsewhere. The Germans have a very strong tradition of functional/ergonomic kitchen design, going back to the socially-aware 1920's and efforts to improve worker housing. Read all about the famous Frankfurt Kitchen here and here. (Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was Austria's answer to Lillian Gilbreth.)

But then there's also the traditional German aesthetic of cuckoo clocks, carved wood, breakfast nooks and enormous tiled ovens. It's a class issue, as these things often are -- so you see far less of the cuckoo clocks and more of the sleek Bulthaupt in the kitchen porn mags.

Germany has smaller habitat spaces than the US in general. Appliances are smaller than the US norm and the standard refrigerator is an under-counter model about the size of an American dishwasher. (This makes the perennial GW question of where to place the honkin' huge fridge irrelevant for most Germans.)

Perusing the latest kitchen design mags for Germany, Austria, Switzerland (all one market), I do notice a few things of interest.

--> They are not as in love with upper cabinets as Americans. And when they do have them, they tend to be the lift-open type rather than the side-hinged ones we're familiar with here.

--> Germans are not afraid of color, and their combinations are not always what we see here. Check out the violet purple cabs with pumpkin accents:

Or purple and black:

Pistachio and gray:

--> But when they do white, they do WHITE:

--> Germans, like most Europeans, don't drink tap water. They haul bottled water and beverages home by the case every week,
requiring kitchens to provide space for the cases:

--> Tiered electric food steamers are the new appliance non plus ultra.
Here from Miele:
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--> Small spaces lead to more innovation. It's like IKEA meets the '20's bungalow kitchen.
Because they seldom use wood for cabinetry, they can do some interesting things with doors and corners:

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--> They're also inordinately fond of large walls of cabinets -- they prioritize storage over prep space:

My last kitchen came from Cucine Lube in Italy. At that time, they were supposedly the third largest kitchen manufacturer in Italy. Their styles seem to exist at opposite ends of the spectrum - quite modern and rather twee "classic."

There are some nice sets of photos under Models.

Here is a link that might be useful: Here they are in English