Cooking with a LOTTA Flair!

A few weekends ago I made a quick road trip to Pennsylvania Amish country.  My  mission - pick up a vintage dual oven/stove combo and matching cabinet.

Before I started this blog, I had found a vintage blog in Richmond I was following.  It's no longer around as far as I can tell.  Anyway, one of that blog's posts highlighted a very cool vintage oven/stove combo made in the early 1960s by Frigidaire called the Flair.  And there seems to be a lot of Flair devotees.  There's a Google Group, and you can find several other sources for manuals and repair parts. The more I researched the Frigidaire Flair, the more I wanted this item that was about 100 miles away.

It was dirt cheap, I think I gave the seller $50 for it.  But the hard part was wrestling it into my truck, and then getting it out and put away in the basement.  The thing is built like a battleship, REALLY heavy!  The Flair is not your normal oven/stove combo.  The dual ovens are on top at eye level much like a wall oven. The stove top is hidden away like a closed drawer.  You push a button and pull on the drawer pull and you then have the cooktop exposed.  When you're done, you "close the drawer."  Very cool.

Don't you love the great 1960s font and details on this clock?

I ended up delaying my plans to use the Flair in our kitchen, because I subsequently learned that I really needed the metal cabinet that was an option with the oven. I didn't want to try to build a wood cabinet to match our other cabinets, and the Flair isn't built to screw to the wall.  So I've been looking for a cabinet for more than three years!

Recently I did a search of Craigslist in both the DC and Baltimore areas, and I found another oven/stove combo with the cabinet and also with a matching overhead vent.

This is the pic from the craigslist ad - 

the base cabinet is what I've needed

For $100 it looked like a great deal and I figured if I needed parts I could combine the two Flairs to make one good working one, and maybe sell the parts to recoup my money.  Or, if they both work, hopefully I could resell the other one to someone else dying to find a Flair.

This is the first oven, the one in the basement.  The two are identical in size, 40 inches wide (bigger than today's ovens, but perfect for the space in our kitchen, since our house was built in 1958).  The two are not exactly the same, however.  They're slightly different models and may have been produced in different years.  I need to do more research on that.

Here's the base cabinet, which I've already disassembled and given a fresh coat of white appliance paint.
Repainting the cabinet was the easy part.  The Flair attaches to the cabinet with four bolts and nuts.

The hard part is going to be getting the second Flair off the truck, figuring out which one to install in the kitchen, and dealing with the cleaning and testing of the heating elements BEFORE I pay someone to help move it into the kitchen and install it.  I'll keep you posted.

If you want a Flair but don't have an existing 40-inch opening for it, you could look for a narrower, single-oven Flairs.  There's currently one of those listed on the Washington DC craigslist.