The lovely wife (LW) and I recently built a house (which is hopefully the house we will live in until they stick us in the big incinerator and set us on fire.) LW is a bit of a cooking nut. For me this is awesome as that just means lots of good food made from real ingredients. But in building the house, this means she wanted serious cooking tools.
In my extremely non-scientific observation of friends and family, I have found that it seems to be that the cost and finish of a kitchen (and appliances therein) is generally inversely proportional to the amount of actual cooking that happens inside it. As a cheap ass bastard, I was lucky that LW had been doing her research for several years and had landed on her "ultimate cookery machine" -- and that it wasn't a multi-thousand dollar behemoth.
It just so turns out that the "Cadillac" stoves of the 1940's and 1950's are: affordable, dependable, extremely simple to work on, darn cute and are a real-life cook's dream stove. In particular I speak of: the beloved Chambers stove.
And here's where it gets all mustachey... These stoves sold for around $360 in the late 40's. Plug that into your inflation calculator and you're looking at a stove that was around $3400 in today's dollars. And if you shop around craigslist and give it some time, they can be had for $100 or less today (see note 1) -- usually in working order.
But wait! There's more!
The design of this stove (and the marketing tag line of it's day) was such that it cooks with the gas turned off. The oven and thermowell (see note 2) are so well insulated that you generally bring the oven up to temperature and turn it off. When you turn it off, all of the heat vents clamp down closed and the oven cooks on retained heat. For example, a 20 lb turkey will cook with 45 minutes of gas and 4 hours of retained heat.
Caveats and notes:
1) As we were making it a bit of a center conversation piece, I bought a pair of them for $300 (with an additional Chambers cook top thrown in for free). I could probably have cooked on one of these as it was, but did a total tear down and restoration on it. I believe actual end cost ended up at about $1000 after rechroming and adding a "safety system". I could have spent less -- and had it been for a rental house I certainly would have.
2) What the heck is a thermowell? I am glad you asked. Think of it as a bizarre combination of an oven and a cooktop. It is a cooktop burner that sits down inside an extremely insulated well. The small size and direct heat make it heat up very quickly. The insulation means you don't have to burn the gas very long at all. You can even bake in it with a special heat diffuser.
3) Check with your local codes. In some areas people have had difficulty getting code approval for non-electronic ignition devices. Most people have been able to work around this with rational discussion and demonstration.... though a handful have met with a few overzealous types and have been thwarted. Personally, I've seen electronic ignition fail in really bad ways. Either ignition system has it's downfalls.