When I think about the past few years of kitchen design, the overarching trend can be summed up with the following question: “How can I make my kitchen not look like a kitchen?” I believe this to be true partly because of the extreme popularity of open kitchens. When your kitchen is wide open to the rest of the home, you want it to fit in and look a little softer. We’ve taken out upper cabinets and hung sconces and art in their place, and paneled appliances so that you can’t find the dishwasher or the refrigerator. Recently, I concealed pantry doors with paneling so that you can’t even tell there’s a pantry in the kitchen. We’ve added beautiful furniture details to cabinets and islands, and the rugs that are put in front of the kitchen sink are what you would normally see in an entry hall.
We’ve also been concealing the stove hood. Sometimes, the only piece of large equipment visible is the stove. The stove has become a shrine of sorts in the kitchen and, conversely, the hood is frequently covered and sometimes it’s absent.
What do you put inside these hood wraps? It’s something called a liner insert. According to Cody Gasner, at Colorado’s Specialty Appliance, VentAHood is “one of the most effective and quietest hoods in the market. Most of the people who have been selling appliances for the longest time own these hoods.” They are also the hood inserts that I most frequently recommend as a designer. Cody also recommends looking at Best hood liners. “They have some liners with the ‘IQ Blower’ which is supposed to be one of the more effective and quiet hood liner options out there.”
Now that we understand the guts, what should you put around them? Here are 7 concealed hood ideas to get you shimmying down the path to un-kitchening your kitchen.
- A Re-claimed Beam:
2. Wood Wrap:
2. Molding and Paneling:
3. Molding and Drywall:
4. An Upper Cabinet:
5. Tile:
6. Just Drywall:
7. No hood at all:
“An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
The Colorado Nest 
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