Ailisa - I have the Provence Yellow and no, it is not overwhelming. In my kitchen it is considered a 'neutral' actually. I have wine-stained cherry cabinets on the bottom & a 'green' stone countertop, and a super-heated copper backsplash. The color in the kitchen is 'deep', so there's no one element which 'pops'. I think you'd find that with any color you chose. 'Pop' or 'brightness' is a function of contrast. Even the lemon yellow could, under the right circumstances, be considered a neutral. And any color can seem scary when placed against a white background and white can be "popless" if there's no other color to contrast with it. That's what makes black 'dramatic,' as opposed to "dark". It's all about context. So, the question you need to ask yourself - if you've made some color choices already - is do you want contrast, or complimentary? If you want contrast, going 'lighter' in color saturation (think new white tennis shoes and new jeans) or 'darker' (think black in the middle of a 4th of July party) than the surrounding environment should perform a function. If you want complimentary, you can pair orange and fuchsia together - if you've got a chocolate brown base & the colors are 'relaxing' instead of 'clownish'. I started with my 'cabernet' stained bottom cabinets with lighter stained uppers & that drove the rest of the choices. Here is a link that might be useful: I'm still happy with the color choices after 6 years

In 2005, we undertook a huge to-the-studs kitchen remodel of a 400 sq ft kitchen. I had been a member of the Southern Living message boards and heard about garden web through a member on that site. My husband and I had already purchased a Dacor 36" cooktop as I'd had one previously and I found the Lacanche. Fell in love from the good people here. Got some amazing information here, especially from momto4kids. Purchased sight unseen, as I said previously. I had the Sully which I loved more than anything I'd ever owned. My dh let me have it and we sold the Dacor. We ended up moving to another house and I was faced with another purchase for MY personal cooking style. I had constraints on time and on space. My Sully wouldn't fit here, even if I could have brought it. And I did hours of research on the two ranges. This range is NOT a piece of junk as alluded to previously. I only gave my experience to the OP since I have owned both ranges within the last 7 years after I joined this site. My Sully was great but the right door was completely warped and never closed correctly. Couldn't be fixed. We had numerous ignition problems and had to have repairs. I haven't complained once on this site. Art Culinaire answered my questions without fail and in no way am I complaining. The Cornufe has been great as well, certainly equally as good in my eyes as my Sully. Just a different look and color, solid as a rock. I give thanks to all who posted here helping me previously, and I won't be back. This is why I'm always hesitant to post here. I've seen many a post by so many Lacanche owners here, including chef marty, marcolo, clinresga, joeboldt, momto4kids, claire de luna, pirula, and many others. I read the posts all day and night. I don't regret that purchase and I don't regret my Cornufe. Thanks for a great time and lots of great information.

I found lots of stuff on the web about using ammonia to clean the oven -- put a bowl or pot of ammonia into a heated (though currently off) oven, leave it overnight, and in the morning simply wipe all the crud out. I did use this trick for the oven shelves -- put the shelves in a black trash bag with a cup of ammonia and leave overnight, then rinse them clean in the morning.The oven shelves looked like *new* when I took them out and washed them off. I have no doubt ammonia would have worked like a charm in the oven as well, except that after 15 minutes I was sure that we were all going to be asphyxiated in the night by the ammonia fumes, so I took the bowl out. What I ended up using was basically baking soda and vinegar and water, mixed together. Yes, you get a fizzy mess when the baking soda and vinegar mix. Once that cooled down, I coated the entire inside of the oven with the goop, as much as I possibly could. I let it stand over night. The next morning, using a sponge (frequently washed out), I wiped out the entire inside of the oven. That oven looked pretty damn good after that. Yes, elbow grease was involved, but it smelled okay (and it was immediately obvious where I hadn't wiped, because it still had white streaks). In the future: I'm going to try to get on top of spills/messes earlier (I bought a mat for the bottom of the oven now), and I'm going to use the baking soda/vinegar trick. If you want things to be really easy and you don't mind a strong smell, the ammonia is amazing. Here is a link that might be useful: Baking soda and vinegar

The difficult to clean bit was promoted by Wolf — according to our local Wolf sales folks. Background: The least expensive manufacturing situation is to make the exact same thing over and over and over. E.G., all sealed or all open for instance. It's more expensive to try to build both as it requires additional design work, more parts to be stocked, increased manufacturing time and machines, double the QA effort, increased effort writing user and technician manuals, more training for CS folks, more marketing effort, etc. Over time Wolf chose to focus on pro-look aesthetics over functionality. They chose to go after the consumers for whom looks was more important than functionality. From a sales revenue standpoint this was a very good choice as the 'Wolf Look' was/is very popular and the number of people who wanted the look is greater than those who want actual functionality to cook on. Offering sealed burners rather than open provided valuable marketing blurbs - 'easier to clean' and 'as easy to clean'. This was pumped out to sales folks all over. What they didn't want is DCS or Thermador telling the people that their ranges were easier to clean than Wolf. In reality, for people who want a spic-and-span-always-looks-brand-new-never-been-used kitchen then sealed burners are better. They are a bit easier to keep new looking. But only a bit, not the huge FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) difference that's been promoted. It's similar to FUD spread by Ford about electric cars and how awful they are or the FUD spread by Monster Cable about how much better stuff sounded over their cables. FUD is an extremely powerful marketing tool. Wolf still makes good stuff but as has been discussed, their sealed burners are not a cooks best friend. They waste a lot of heat/gas, they are hotter for the cook to cook on vs an open burner due to much of the heat going around the pan rather than under, often do not heat as evenly, etc. What's interesting is that Blue Star are supposedly going after more serious cooks but then have an inferior (vs Wolf) thermostatic griddle (flat top) on the RNB, only offer their higher BTU burners paired with an even more inferior burner-top griddle, have rack ladders that are too narrow for many pro pans, etc. They got the burner shape right but then miss on so much else and for no good reason. Interestingly, they also missed on their hood offering by putting out the exact same thing with the same problems as is available from every other consumer pro-look option rather than offering a hood with actual better functionality. Their product marketing decisions seem amazingly bad. There's a gob of people who want a really good range, a really good range hood and are willing to pay but BS doesn't want to take advantage but instead wants to try to partially compete with Wolf.