Not all 48" ranges have ovens "on the floor". Mine certainly doesn't. The bottoms of the oven aren't very low and anyway I use racks which make the level of cooking just at the bottom of the easiest-reach zone. Not problem for me to reach, and easily look down and into the pots. And the broiler is in the ceiling of the small oven so it's at about the level of the bottom of a typical top drawer in a cab. I do a lot of cooking that evolves from stovetop to oven and vice versa and its very convenient having it all in one spot. I wouldn't like hauling a very hot cast iron skillet across the kitchen to the oven to finish a sear roast. And I would sorely miss being able to warm up the oven and easily stow serially-cooked things (like pancakes, or fritters) that I was accumulating - and keeping warm - before plating the whole meal. I like having all the HOGS-generators in one place and (theoretically) under one hood for extraction. (I say theoretically because my range doesn't have a hood as it's still in my "temporary" kitchen.) I don't find that it's overly hot standing in front of my ovens, nor a pain because of having to stand aside. I rarely have both ovens and all 6 burners going so I can switch things around as necessary. (I only have 6 burners on the 48" because I have removed the char-grill section and replaced it with a granite slab, but that's a whole 'nuther story.) My machine is all-gas because I wanted it that way. And it's older - verging on two decades now - so it's not as high at BTU as some available now. I really, really, really love my tall, narrow, smaller oven and use it more than 75% of the time. The larger one (a convection model) is almost too big. And if I had larger wall ovens I would be fussed about heatng them up for a couple of baked potatoes or a single cake. The major con I can think off is that a 48" range is inevitably one of the main drivers in kitchen design simply because of its size. It is the proverbial 400-lb gorilla. My range is an old Jade/Dynasty, no longer available but will probably outlast me. But if it should die, I'm pretty confident I would always replace it with a range, not a cooktop/double wall-oven setup. I'm not sure I would get another 48" model, however, so I might wind up with an additional single wall-oven used only for baking, not roasting or broiling. HTH L.

I love our 48" Viking. There is plenty of room when dh and I are cooking at the same time and the extra space also comes in handy when I'm cooking alone. I love having unused burners to slide hot pots onto for cooling off or as landing space for hot items from the oven. It contains all the hot items to one space instead having them scattered across the counter on trivets. And there are times when all of our burners are used at once (we have 6 + a griddle.) I use the small oven most of the time for our family of 4. The large oven is handy when I cook mulitiple items at the same temp or when I use large cookie sheets. Having 2 ovens comes in handy for different oven temps and for when one oven is tied up by something baking for an hour that shouldn't be disturbed. Take your favorite baking dishes to the showroom to make sure they fit into the small oven. The dishes I brought were a 9" Pyrex pie pan and a 9x13 pan. They fit fine in our Viking but didn't in some other brands. The brand I was leaning toward got eliminated because the oven rack brackets decreased the usable space so much that I couldn't fit either of the 2 dishes I brought. Just reading the oven specs wouldn't have been good enough since it seemed the oven was plenty big. Dh was happy we ended up with his top choice by default. I would definitely buy another 48" range if I had to do over again. Getting a range with 2 ovens and plenty of burner/elbow space was a splurge that made a lot of sense to us.

Just a thought. When we bought our 48” Wolf 18 years ago. Two different people who worked there came up and asked us what we were going to put on the wall behind the stove. We told them we were planning on the 12” stainless riser. Behind that my husband put up fireproof cement board covered with antique brick. On the cabinets on either side we used stainless steel. They seemed relieved. We decided on the brick because of the char broiler which puts out a lot of smoke. I couldn’t see putting up tile with grout, since I’d never be able to keep that grout clean. Congratulations on your Wolf and I hope you enjoy it for many years to come.

I've mentioned this before, but hot cooking can generate meter per second rising and expanding cooking plumes. Generally, these will have larger sectional area than the pop-up slot area facing the plume. Yet, somehow, the slot velocity is expected to be high enough that the vector combination of vent air and plume effluent at the plume and over the entire plume area will be directed toward the slot. However, the slot acting as a mini hood has, like all hoods, to follow the behavior documented in the 2003 ASHRAE Handbook: HVAC Applications. There, Figure 6 page 30.4 shows that the air velocity has dropped to 10% of its slot opening value at 1.6 times the narrow dimension of the slot. Yet most of the plume is multiple slot dimensions away. One imagines that the slot velocity would have to be 30 m/s of so to be fully effective. (Let's assume induction cooking so we don't have to deal with flame extinction.) A 3-inch by 48-inch slot (1 sq. ft. area) would have to move air at 6000 CFM to accomplish this. Given the pressure loss of the slot, I can imagine the large and noisy blower this would require. In case this makes one wonder how regular hoods can work, please note that regular kitchen hoods do not pull effluent away from their direction of flow, but depend on the flow to bring the plumes to the hoods for capture.