please talk to me about your Lacanche range

[highlandcoo]

We are having a new (painted wooden) kitchen soon and have almost chosen a Lacanche range. Lots of agonising still going on about the colour, and also the configuration of ovens, hob etc.

I love the ivory colour with nickel trim, but would that look too plain with kitchen cupboards of the same colour .. does it need to contrast to look good? In which case either the kitchen needs to be a soft grey/green or grey/blue (think French grey - very subtle) with an ivory range, or we go for a cream kitchen and a coloured range .. maybe the Delft blue .. which DH doesn't like.

My other question - we have 1m of space, so going for the Cluny model. The choice is a classic hob with five burners, or a traditional with a cast iron simmer plate in the middle. Any opinions on which is better would be great. I like the sound of a simmer plate but have never used one .. is it good?

DH is fed up of going round in circles discussing this. I need to decide in the next couple of days

Have you decided about the Lacanche? We had one delivered last Thursday and are now waiting to get it installed - hopefully middle of next week...

We currently have a flueless gas heat storage range but it has not been working properly since the end of April and having a broken cooker all summer has not been fun. After it was needing repaired for the third time, and being let down by the engineer, I decided enough was enough and needed to buy a new cooker.

Friends of ours had just bought an ex-display Citeaux direct from Fourneaux de France in Dorset so suggested I contact them. FdF had a Macon on their website which would have suited our kitchen, but it had been sold the previous afternoon. However, they were very helpful in telling me that they do hold a small amount of cookers in stock - so once you know what oven combination you want, you then pick from the colours they have available, but you you have to do this through one of their dealers and not direct.

So we decided to go with dual fuel Macon with the traditional hob (I am hoping this will be quite a similar way of cooking to the range I have had...) and a combination of static and convection ovens - this combination had the biggest range of colours available at the time (two weeks ago). I really liked the Mist Grey, but we have a cream fridge and black extractor fan so went with the Anthracite which I'm really pleased with.

Have been feeling a bit daft as our existing cooker decided to start working daily again after ordering the Lacanche so I was absolutely delighted when it decided to switch itself off on Sunday evening - justified my new purchase!

Apologies for such a long post - hope you've managed to decide what to go with!