I am getting close to pulling the trigger on the copper hood... It is just so expensive! :0) But I really want a "statement piece" in the kitchen, and I think it will look great with that 42" copper sink! The granite though, that granite is soooooo expensive. :0(

Thanks for the responses guys, Yes, this is the picture. Nice to see that the owner of this awesome kitchen (nhbaskets) is still around and following the discussions as to whether or not I'll steal your crown idea ;-) I do all my own work, so there is no GC involved. I have already done all the room crown and have tried the chimney both with and without crown already. In fact, it's up now, just have not decided if I want to leave it. Yeah, it's a pain to attach, but not impossible. I can't decide which way I think looks better, so I was wondering if there was a standard way to do it. Also, with the crown you can not easily remove the chimney cover, should you ever have to. Now from what I'm hearing, the standard way seems to be to not wrap the crown around the chimney, but the reason seems to be based on how *difficult* it is rather than what actually looks best. Is there anyone else out there who has a crown-wrapped SS chimney? Any pictures?

Flat pieces of wood to fill the area...I have a 54" hood over a 36" cooktop + a 12 " Miele deep fat fryer. There is space between so this = the exact width of all the cooking surfaces. It is not necessary to have the extra width on either side if you have a powerful and efficient hood. You can have flat pieces of the cabinet wood to fill the area for 3 " on each side. It can be painted to match the cabs. My wood hood surround is exactly as it was almost 3 yrs ago after extensive use of high heat cooking. Don't panic....you don't need that big of a hood and I wouldn't accept it. Hope others chime in with their info. Here is a pic of ours...

You can strive for affordability, performance, and aesthetics, but you can have only two. Performance includes both hood capture and containment, and hood system noise level; affordability includes the costs of both the ventilation system and any other changes or systems that make-up air requirements impose. For background, I suggest you review the myriad hood and MUA topics on this forum. There are also some good papers on kitchen ventilation out there, mainly commercial cooking oriented, but one can extrapolate. Greenheck is one manufacturer with a good paper on the subject. Various air quality boards have also produced them. Combining the search terms "kitchen ventilation" and "schlieren" will be productive. I don't have time right now to go over all the requirements and desirements that affect performance, so I'll limit myself to noting what I have installed because it or something like it would work for you. The hood is a Wolf Pro Island hood, 66 inches wide. (See Wolf Design Guide.) It adequately overlaps a 36-inch induction cooktop and a nearby Cooktek induction wok hob. Ducting is 10-inch, with a Fantech silencer in the path. A Wolf roof-top blower (actually made by Broan) terminates the ducting. It is rated at 1500 cfm at zero static pressure (which you won't have, so derate all cfm claims). The internal aperture of this hood is about 10 square feet and I achieve on high blower setting probably 90 cfm/square foot as desired for full capture with baffles (and probably meshes). One can converse along or across this hood at full power mainly limited by wok cooking sizzle. My last comment for now is: Ventilation power cost is at or near the top of all commercial kitchen expenses. The industry has spent a lot of effort attempting to have good cooking plume capture and containment for the least operating cost. From this you might deduce that commercial hoods are going to be fairly optimal for their purpose. Commercial plume capture and containment is not that different from our residential cooking plume capture and containment. Hence, the more a residential hood diverges in configuration from a commercial counterpart, the closer one must investigate to decide whether the trade-offs that were made for aesthetics do not impair the hood function more than you will tolerate. Once installed and your nose and ears make the final decision, it is too late. kas