Range Cookers

A range cooker is more than an appliance — it's the centrepiece of a kitchen. At Derbyshire Kitchen Company, we work with five of the most respected names in the industry, each with its own heritage and personality. Here's what sets them apart.

Smeg — Italian Style, Since 1948

Smeg began life in 1948 in Guastalla, Emilia-Romagna, founded by Vittorio Bertazzoni as a metalworking and enamelling business — hence the name, short for Smalterie Metallurgiche Emiliane Guastalla. The company presented its first own-brand cooker, Elisabeth, in 1956, and has spent the decades since building a reputation for design that turns heads as much as it cooks dinner. Today Smeg's range cookers — most notably the colourful Portofino line — bring that same playful, unmistakably Italian design language into serious cooking appliances.

ILVE — Handcrafted in Veneto Since 1952

Founded in Campodarsego, in Italy's Veneto region, ILVE has built its reputation on ranges hand-assembled by skilled artisans, with no two ever quite alike. Each ILVE cooker is hand-built by a single craftsman from stainless steel, cast iron, brass and copper. With hundreds of colour and trim combinations, ILVE ranges are as much a design statement as a cooking appliance — a genuine investment piece for a kitchen built around good food.

AGA — The Swedish Invention That Became a British Icon

AGA's story starts in 1922 in Sweden, with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr Gustaf Dalén, who was convalescing at home after losing his sight in an accident when he realised his wife was using a range that was dangerous, dirty and exceptionally time-consuming. His solution — a cast-iron cooker that stores and radiates heat continuously — arrived in the UK in 1929 and was built under licence by Allied Ironfounders in Shropshire, who would later become AGA Rangemaster. Today's AGA remains a genuine slow-heat, always-on centrepiece — a cooker that becomes part of the rhythm of the house.

Everhot — Cotswold-Made, Low-Energy Heat Storage

The first Everhot was invented in the mid-1970s by engineer Ossie Goring at 13th-century Coaley Mill in Gloucestershire, where the company is still based today. Living at the water mill, Goring set out to create an environmentally friendly electric range cooker that could run off the mill's water turbine, eventually perfecting a low-draw "trickle-feed" design. Every Everhot is still hand-built in the Cotswolds, in a carbon-negative factory. It's a genuinely modern take on the heat-storage range: all the warmth and character of an AGA-style cooker, engineered from day one for efficiency.

Rangemaster — Britain's Original Range Cooker

Rangemaster's story starts in 1830 with William Flavel's Kitchener — widely regarded as the world's first range cooker, and every Rangemaster is still designed and built by hand at the same Royal Leamington Spa site today, across the 90cm, 100cm and 110cm range. The factory has passed several manufacturing milestones, including its one-millionth modern range cooker in 2015. Nearly two centuries on, Rangemaster remains the only large-scale British range cooker manufacturer — proof that some things are worth keeping in-house.

Why It Matters for Derbyshire Kitchen Company Customers

Whether you want the bold Italian design of Smeg or ILVE, the timeless slow-heat warmth of an AGA or Everhot, or the home-grown engineering of Rangemaster, our design team can help you choose — and build a kitchen layout around — the range cooker that actually suits how you cook, not just how a kitchen looks in a brochure.