We prefer a hob on the island, we also agree with your husband that new induction technology will be the safest option for you and your family. The rings only get hot when a pan is on them and when a pan is removed, yes there is still heat there, however it is not scalding hot. It is also more sociable in our opinion to have the hob on the island is you are entertaining people. In regards to the extraction, you could ask your builder/kitchen installer to build a drop ceiling detail the same size and shape of your island to set the island location and have an extractor built into it which wouldn't be in your eye sight, you can also get external motors which boost the power and strength making the extraction work better. Call us on 0208 508 1941 or email us on info@anderson-sinclair.co.uk if you want to discuss or get some inspiration.

The Bora might use up the top 199cm of your cabinet (thereby losing your top drawer) but the Novy will occupy 170 mm of the back of your cabinet and therefore you will loose room in your drawer and pull outs. So personally I would choose the Bora. It also makes more sense to me to have the Extractor vent in the middle plus the Bora X Pure has flexible cooking zones which is better should you have a large griddle or a roaster that you want to use on the hob.

Hmm, I might be wrong but my understanding is that a recirculating extractor doesn't get rid of steam, only grease and smells. It's confusing - I read lots about it and didn't find many definitive answers - but my understanding was that if we had a recirculating-only cooktop extractor, we would also benefit from a wall mounted expelair type extractor too, which we didn't want. Hence we went for an exhaust air model as we wanted ours to do the whole job. The bit where it ducts out has a system whereby it only opens when its extracting - and the ducting is several metres long so there's no sense of cold air coming up through the hob top, even on these recent very cold, windy and frosty days. I can only say that in my experience, if you want an island hob exhaust air model (as opposed to recirculating), there are costs which are additional to the cost of the hob itself - ie the ducting pipes and the work that goes into planning and executing the ducting under the floor and out to the open air. The position of the ducting has to be millimetre perfect at quite an early stage of the build so we had a lot of head scratching and very careful work to make sure that our kitchen plan and the position of the ducting were exactly aligned. We've paid our builder a day rate so there's definitely been an extra, if slightly undefinable, cost there. Perhaps in some cases it's very straightforward but in ours it wasn't, and as I said the ducting itself isn't cheap (around £100/m) - so in a direct comparison between a recirculating and a ducting version of the same cooktop (where the cooktops themselves cost exactly the same) the ducting one was a more expensive option for us, but one we're glad we went for. I should say we're in a 1930s house, which, although we're doing our best to make it energy efficient, is never going to be airtight like a passiv haus. So for us the benefit of getting rid of steam outweighs any potential small energy loss through the ducting to the outside. Of course everything I've said above may be rubbish... I'm just a girl trying to do a renovation with conflicting advice from all sides... :)

The Bora Basic is a ceramic hob and the Pure is Induction. Induction hobs are faster to heat up and cool down meaning it’s easier to control your cooking. However some people with pacemakers avoid induction hobs and prefer ceramic hobs. Ceramic hobs are normally cheaper.