October 16, 2020

Kitchen Appliance Selections | Hestan

Today, I’m excited to share which appliances we selected for our new house! I had mentioned in a previous blog post that we are using Hestan appliances in our kitchen and pantry. On the blog, I talked about our kitchen floor plan, original kitchen 3D renderings, and why we selected Hestan. We definitely focused on quality for our appliances for this house; I simply can’t express how excited we are to finally share these Hestan products with you! Let’s go over the kitchen appliances first!

I’m going to start off with my favorite…the kitchen range. 😉 We went with the Hestan 48” 5-burner all gas range with 12” griddle. There are 12 colors to choose from, and I picked “froth” for our range which is the white color. Since our perimeter kitchen cabinets will be a soft blue, I wanted to keep the range color neutral.

One of my favorite features of the Hestan range is the CircuFlame center power burner which provides 30,000 BTU’s of high performance cooking power. You can go from 0º to crab boil in no time! I also really like the backlit knobs. When the range or oven is in use, those specific knobs are lit. This is a great safety feature! My kids know they’re not allowed to touch the range (except my 11 year old daughter), but at least I can easily see if the range/oven is turned on just by looking at the knobs. I’m also that person that needs to check the range to make sure everything is off before I leave the house. Now I can take a quick look at the knobs and head out the door.

After using a variety of ovens, the features that I’m also excited about is the soft close of the oven doors. Who has an oven right now that slams shut? 😉 I also like how it has full extension telescopic professional oven racks that glide easily so you can conveniently access your food. Our oven in the last house had one rack that glided and I always wished that all the racks were like that. Now my wish is coming true!

Ours will be a 48” range, but look at this image of a Hestan froth colored 36” range… so pretty!

Now let’s talk about the refrigerator and freezer! We went with the 60” column freezer and refrigerator Ensemble Refrigeration Suite. This comes in 12 colors similar to the range, but you can also do a custom wood panel. I’ll be doing a custom panel (blue), so the refrigerator and freezer will look like cabinets. I wanted a seamless look for this area.

In our last house, one of the things we regretted was not getting a column freezer and refrigerator. With four kids, we were always running out of room! One of Hestan’s great features is its EvenFlow Air Circulating Technology which creates an air curtain to prevent cold air from escaping when the door opens. Another feature I love is that its drawers/bins have a soft close. Also, you can adjust the shelves without removing any items! There’s so many times when I have to rearrange food/beverages in my fridge because stuff won’t fit. Now I can easily glide the shelves up and down without having to move food, jars and beverages! Also, those drawers are bead-blasted stainless steel refrigerator EverCrisp drawers which are antimicrobial and prevent the growth of microorganisms and the spreading of germs.

We love to entertain, so we’re really excited about the FreshSelect feature which allows us to transform our freezer into the same temp as our refrigerator if needed! The freezer has three cooling zones: classic refrigerator zone, extend fresh refrigerator zone, and freezer zone. This is perfect when I have family over for the holidays! If we’re running out of refrigerator space, we can convert our freezer to a refrigerator!

Here’s a rendering of the refrigerator and freezer area in the new house. Yes the cabinets will be blue, but this isn’t the right color…pretend it’s a softer blue. 😉

Now onto the dishwashers! Did you notice I said dishwashers? Yes, two. We’re not messing around over here! Ha! We’ll have one in the kitchen island and the other by the window sink. The dishwasher by the window sink is our main dishwasher and the other dishwasher in the kitchen island is near the prep sink. We figured if someone is cooking or preparing food, they can easily put dishes in the one by the prep sink. For both areas, we went with the 24” dishwasher. Similar to the other Hestan appliances, it comes in 12 colors. We will be doing the steeletto color (stainless steel) for the kitchen island dishwasher and a custom panel (blue) for the window sink dishwasher. I’m going with a custom panel for the window sink dishwasher because as mentioned before, I wanted a seamless look which will blend in with the perimeter kitchen cabinets and drawers.

Here’s an image of the window sink area. The cabinet/drawer to the right of the sink is the dishwasher with the panel.

Here’s an image of what the steeletto color looks like:

Now for my favorite Hestan dishwasher features! When the dishwasher cycle is complete, the door automatically opens to eliminate spots and save energy. Also, the dishwasher is very quiet. It’s so quiet there’s an LED display on the floor to show that the dishwasher is running. There’s also a third rack which is customizable. You can put cookie sheets and utensils up there or move it to make room for bigger pots and pans.

Let’s talk about microwaves! We had a drawer microwave in the last house, so we knew we wanted another one in the new house. This saves countertop space and also is great if you don’t have room for a microwave on the wall. Our 30” drawer microwave will be located in the kitchen island and this one is a little bigger than the one in our last house. It can hold a 4 qt. casserole or 20 oz beverage! If you’ve never seen a drawer microwave before, it smoothly glides open and close which prevents spills.

Here’s the rendering of the kitchen islands. Below you can see where the dishwasher will be and the opening to the right of that is where the drawer microwave will go.

The last thing in the kitchen is the ventilation hood. We went with the Hestan 48” liner hood which will have a custom overlay. Love how this is ultra quiet, and their CircuFlow Ventilation System collects 70% more grease than most competitor products in the marketplace. Also, the blower speed automatically increases when higher temperatures are detected and when the full blower power is not needed, the blower speed automatically lowers for even quieter operation.

Here’s one hood design inspo I’m eyeing for our kitchen. Love the simplicity of it!

The last set of appliances I’ll be talking about is in the pantry! In our last house, we had a refrigerator in our garage for drinks and other food that didn’t fit in our refrigerator inside the house. When we were designing the kitchen pantry in the new house, I made sure we had enough room in the pantry for an extra refrigerator. We love to have people over, so I wanted them to easily grab drinks from the refrigerator in the pantry rather than going to the garage. Also as some of you know, Nick and I purchased the Winterset Cidery last year and we wanted to have bottles of cider chilled and ready to serve to our friends and family. We will have the 24” column refrigerator and the 24” wine cellar right next to each other in the pantry. Nick is super excited the wine cellar can hold two different temperatures depending on what wine/cider he is trying to cool. The refrigerator will be left hinged and the wine cellar is right hinged. These two appliances will be the froth color since my cabinets in the pantry will be white.