Definitely a corner FP. Most houseplans have them in the middle of a wall and it will restrict you in furniture and TV placement. Unless it's a short wall with built-in's on either side. A corner FP will free up all the walls for furniture, TV and windows. I love our FP in the corner. We have a TV on one wall along with a window, and the other wall has plenty of wall space along with two large windows. This way we can enjoy the view (we're in the country), TV and FP at the same time.

I played with your plan a wee bit, turning the laundry room and baking pantry on their sides and moving your kitchen appliances around quite a bit. =) Both laundry room and baking pantry are wider in this plan, which means that you have better aisles in both spaces. I didn't realize until I working on your plan how narrow your baking pantry was. If you were spec'ing standard depth counters & cabs along one wall and 12" cabs on the other, you're left with less than 29" for the aisle. That's fine if you don't intend to work in their but since it sounds like you want to do baking prep in here, that's not going to work well at all, especially if you want your kids to help you. My plan does mean no window in your laundry room but you could always add clerestory windows between baking pantry and laundry room to let light flow from one to the other, like they did between spaces in this home. Okay, into the kitchen. I removed the wing walls on each side of the dining area so that you're not pinched for space around the table. However, as I wrote above, if you want to keep the walls, you can bump the space out instead. I moved the fridge out of the corner and against the pantry wall. That puts it close to your baking center; shorter walks to get eggs, butter, etc. I moved your clean up sink and 2 DWs to the wall next to the fridge. Here are inspiration pics for sinks against walls, not under windows. Moving the clean-up zone, opened up space to move the range top and hood to an exterior wall. Since you're concerned about noise, you should definitely look into adding an remote blower to your hood. This runs ducting up the exterior wall to your roof where your blower will sit. You'll cut noise quite a bit. I moved the ovens to right next to the baking pantry door so it's an shorter walk with pans of batter. I added a prep sink to your island to give you a good work zone between pantry, fridge and range top. The downside of this plan is that it puts the clean-up sink and dish storage the farthest from the dining area. It also means that anyone wanting to grab last minute items from the fridge to bring to the table will walk through the cook zone. Not ideal but I can't think of another way to address that at the moment. Oh, the other thing I did was recess the full depth fridge into the pantry wall so that it appears to be counter depth. I've no idea what your aisle widths were because you hadn't marked them but you have a large enough space to go for generous 48" aisles.

An interesting thread but also a frustrating one. Of course it follows that if all people know are traditional wood burning fireplaces and gas fireplaces, that debate will be restricted to these two options, omitting any mention of Finnish, German, Russian style Masonry Heaters. I don't like the way they look in a room (unless it is a basement or "play" room), it literally roasts me in the living room but doesn't heat the rest of the house, and I no longer want the work of dealing with wood. However, I love a real fire -- the sound, the smell, the look, the feel -- and have had to weigh the labor issue against that. . . . .. . I'm really looking for the best of all worlds. :) High efficiency (don't want to burn through the propane); convenience; aesthetically pleasing; comfort. Of course a wood stove is going to create those extremes, you're burning wood inside a metal box, heating up the metal to high temperature, that's going to create a drastic temperature swing. Look at this photo. http://mainewoodheat.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/tigheheaterweb.jpg There is literally tons of mass there to soak up the heat of the fire and this heat is released into the home over a period of time, so no drastic roasting effect. These fireplaces are placed into the center of a room so that their heat can radiate into many rooms unlike fireplaces placed on outside walls so that the heat can be radiated to warm the outdoors. High efficiency, Check. These units burn at such a high temperature that there is little smoke and ash. Far higher efficiency than American style fireplaces and wood stoves. Convenience. Check. Can you bake bread or a pizza with your gas-fired unit? Probably not. Have a nice fire in one of these, more roaring than you see in a traditional unit, and then use the residual heat to make yourself a pizza snack. How more convenient can you get? Aesthetically pleasing. Check. You have a lot more latitude in design than you do with traditional fireplaces. The principal drawback is expense. You're putting tons of rocks into your house. Someone has to build that fireplace for you, it needs its own foundation support. Your house design has to be able to accommodate a central location for the fireplace instead of a peripheral add-on location. Off setting the expense is that with one, or two, firings a day, you can heat your house through the winter. Also, that feeling of laying on a warm beach or sun-warmed rock and letting the heat radiate into you body is quite nice to have in your own home, sitting on a built-in bench and letting the heat radiate deep into your muscles is a fantastic feeling after a work-out or coming in from the slopes.

@Terra S - I love how your fireplace and TV wall turned out. We are looking at replacing our off-center fireplace with a linear one. If you could answer some questions, I would really appreciate it. I see that you ID'd your tile, What about your hearth - what is that made of? Also, if you have details on what fireplace you used, I'd love to know that as well. Thanks in advance!