Price difference includes exchange rate, shipping, distribution, dealer markup, and, most importantly, what the market will bear. A big difference is that most of our small urban units are rentals owned by a landlord who owns the whole building and land, and who provides basic appliances, though less and less the fridge. Apartment house appliances are pretty basic, and not what people usually choose for their homes. And we have a lot of basic "builder" kitchens put into housing developments. In Europe the same small apartments are usually leaseholds, where someone owns the land and the skeleton of the building but people buy the use of the apartment, and there are also a lot of what's basically condominiums. They fit those out nicely because they have pride of ownership. So there's a bigger demand for higher end appliances for those. I don't know as much about the suburban developments, though my impression is that there aren't as many. Plus, in the U.S. we still have a lingering attitude that kitchens should be basic, farm style simplicity, and get freaked out by the numbers. $300 in 1960 would be over $2100 today, but we forget that saving up for a $300 appliance was a big deal for our parents, and want to pay less than $1000 for the same thing now, even though there are lots of technological advancements. And we can! If we get the above, basic units. Anyway, there's also the whole supply and demand thing. They have a higher demand for higher end appliances, so the price on them goes down. Add it all together, and you get different prices in different locations.

Oh boy, how I wish I could tell you! Seems like we have been in one of those 'if anything can go wrong, it will' stages of life lately. That, coupled with the weather, seems to keep slowing us down. We are waiting for a replacement cab to be installed Monday. Then the granite guy will cut and install the countertops and we will finally get to install the cooktop. Hope it all comes to pass soon. On a brighter note, I finally did get three appliances installed today. The warming drawer, microwave drawer, and the Miele steam oven. But, true to form these days, the steam oven make a horrible noise during the initial setup for the boiling point so I guess I need them to come back out on that also, When it rains, it pours. lol Good luck with your reno. I hope it is smoother than ours. I can't hardly wait til we can compare notes!

I don't have a Miele but a Diva 36" on the short end of the "L" run. The short end edge to wall is 9 1/2'. I would vote for the 36" - I rarely use all five burners but having the extra room between burners is great. The Diva has a large burner in the middle which allows good working room between the zones. I wouldn't get hung up on the pot size - I'm always under a bit. In fact, I sometimes span two burners on the same zone, (not across zones), to make gravy. Also the burners not in use can easily be used as counter space even when you are cooking as the surrounding surface stays cool. The one thing you do need to consider is the size of the hood. Conventional hood speak advises you to over hang the hood a bit - so a 30" cooktop would take a 36" hood, a 36" cooktop would take a 42" hood. This presented a problem for me as I wanted a minimal look in a wall hood. The hood appearance I wanted was available in a Miele 36" or 48" NOT a 42". I ended up with the 36" Miele hood over my 36" Diva. The 42" would have been perfect but I just did not have the space for the 48" as I have shelves on either side of the hood. This works for me as I don't do a lot of frying. I will say the hood is quite loud. It is the one thing that I purchased solely for the form and not its function. In otherwords, looks ovr performance.

Thank you all for great info! Wolf's cold spots in the middle is a little bummer. I wouldn't expect this kind of design on 5 way bridge cooktop. The elements suppose to be made by French company Jaeger Hiflux. Their Crescendo model is quite different from what I have ever seen in induction cooktops. Check this out.. http://www.jaeger-sas.com/#!induction-en/cl7w Anyway since Wolf has no flex in bridge mode then we might take another look into 36" GE Cafe model which was #3 on our list. It has only one no flex bridge mode, but it's much cheaper than Wolf or Miele. That model has many positive reviews including #1 on CR rating (99 out of 100). On both GE & Wolf we like simple, clean interface. GE is better with 17 vs 10 levels on Wolf. On GE minus side is power sharing (not quite sure how much problem is that in real use) and only 1 year warranty vs 3 year on Wolf. However much bigger problem on GE Cafe is SS color. My DH says that specific color is clashing with our choice of Silestone Kensho countertop (light gray). I don't see it as bad but we might loose it on that argument. No question the decision between Miele vs Wolf vs GE Cafe is giving us more headaches than any other appliance.