The obvious option is a retractable downdraft vent if you can duct through the floor or cabinets. If that option is unavailable, you could do a compromise island-mount hood in one of the less obtrusive sizes, or a more traditional island hood but mounted higher than the customary 30" - 36" above the cooking surface. You would be trading off effectiveness for line of sight enhancements, but certainly you could find a happy medium somewhere in there. OR, check out this idea! You could have somebody engineer a retractable island hood mount that could be driven up out of the way for chit chats and hob nobs but driven down to the business position when heavy cooking ensued. I did a cursory search for such a thing on the internet but was unsuccessful finding one. It should not be that hard, though. Most Island duct covers are already two-piece telescopic affairs to account for variances in ceiling heights. One would need to have a fabricator build a custom mounting frame in substitute or modified from the original. Also required would be a telescopic duct, a fairly easy fabrication for skilled sheetmetal folks. The hood could be extended via wall-mounted switch or remote control. Think what fun the kids/grandkids could have with that one! Now that I am in self-congratulatory mode for coming up with such a brilliant idea, one of the good folks here on GW is going to come in here and tell me that somebody else already thought of this and go to http://somebodypeedinmycornflakes.com to see an example! Blast it!

We had a Thermador range with an integrated downdraft for about 14 years, in the peninsula. I liked the arrangement so well that we kept the location of the stove, refrigerator and sink for the remodel. We also kept the Thermador to use in the new kitchen. That was not a good idea. The stove had problems almost immediately when it was reinstalled. The downdraft was doing fine. Now we had a real problem. We had to replace the stove, but finding one that would fit was a problem. That wasn't the biggest problem for us. We thought we were going to have to install a hood. Our kitchen is at the end of a long room and I remember how I hated the overhead suspended cabinets that were in the original kitchen. I just didn't want something hanging from the ceiling and destroying the view. Since we are old, we wanted a range with a self cleaning oven. It was hard to find one with our specifications that would fit into the space designed for the new kitchen. We bought a Dacor range with a Dacor downdraft. These are separate units. I love the range and the downdraft works perfectly, for us. Long story to get to the point. When the new stove and downdraft were installed, the installers left the vent pipe with the opening upside down on a piece of wood under the house. That mean the downdraft did not work correctly. We could not figure out the problem, so my husband crawled into the crawl space and took pictures. I guess they figured old people would never figure this out. We had to hire another company to redo the venting. They took the vent pipe straight out to the side with no turns. It works perfectly. It even vents the steam from my rice cooker that is on the counter next to the stove. My point is that if installed correctly, a downdraft works.

The best cooktop ventilation depends on your priorities and constraints (more or less like everything else). In commercial practice, it is common to use large capture areas with apertures at about seven feet, but there are many possible approaches, including perforated ceilings leading to exhaust blowers. Commercial practice is heavily biased toward effective and efficient (power wise) capture and containment. Residential practice can make use of commercial approaches, constrained by architecture, aesthetics, cost, and noise. Sometimes, however, the constraints force significant deviation from the most effective approach to capture and containment, considered to be a hood over the cooktop that has an aperture large enough to encompass the rising and expanding cooking plumes from the burners, and with enough air flow to ensure that what is captured is expelled outside. Side draft ventilation will usually have limited ability to capture rising effluent from burners distant from the aperture without having a flow rate that is impractical and/or noisy. (The plume can have an upward velocity of 3 ft/s; the side draft is unlikely to "bend" that plume completely toward itself unless very tall and/or very strong.) A side draft can at least reduce the grease load on the house surfaces and cooking odors distributed beyond the cooktop. Ceiling capture areas have to be large enough to not only encompass most of the expanding cooking plumes, but also the ever easier effects of cross drafts in deviating the plume direction. One would want a capture area of the cooktop size expanded by, say, 0.3 times the distance between the cooktop and the ceiling just for plume expansion without considering unknown to this writer cross draft conditions. So a 3 by 2 foot cooktop could at 5 feet above the cooktop require an added 1.5 feet of width and length. This now 4.5 by 3.5 ft aperture will need perhaps a bit lower velocity of blower air flow than the desirable 90 ft/min velocity at the normal hood height due to the plume cooling off some by the time it gets that high. Lets assume an average of 70 ft/min over the collection area is needed (this is a guess; I have no data for that distance above the cooking surface). This velocity times the area required computes to 1100 CFM. This will require at least a 1500 CFM zero-static-pressure rated blower in most circumstances, and a deliberate MUA system. While roof hugging centrifugal blowers such as Abbaka, Broan, and Wolf sell can somehow operate in snow (I have a Wolf and it stays clear in southern NH), a more commercial style up-blast configuration blower would be better for deep snow conditions. Some upblast blowers at Greenheck kas

^Exactly. Math doesn’t lie. That isn’t a legally habitable space anywhere. And this will not pass inspection anywhere. Is it from 1640? Sn undercabinet hood is not finished on all sides like an island hood. You’d have ugly not meant to be seen metal hanging in the breeze. And it would not capture properly, sine it is not shaped up capture effluent from as wide of an angle as an island hood. Island hoods are finished 360, and are larger front to back. And that’s part of what makes them so expensive.