Product review (4 stars): Looks meet function
We have a mid-century styled kitchen, quality built with Steel St. Charles cabinetry.  It has 2 ovens in a raised island.  We had held off on updating the ovens for 5 years and when one of our existing 40 year old oven failed, we knew we had to take action.

We wanted to stay away from common American brands due to less than savory experiences with them.  From a style perspective, the Smeg seemed the best choice by far.  Face it, the thing looks cool!  Vanity over function is typically out of character for us, but in this case, the oven has all of the features one really needs in an oven and it leaves out all of the fluff that is really not necessary.

Then it came to the price.  WOW!  I am not a cheapskate, but i was having a hard time choking down the 4k plus price tag to get 2 ovens.  End story is that we found several reputable online retailers that had the oven for sale and then found one used one on Amazon from a private party.  Through various emails and even a couple of phone calls, we learned that the used one was essentially new so we purchased it.  This would save us a thousand dollars on this project.  Well, it turns out that the used one was listed incorrectly.  The seller had listed it as Smeg FU655.  When we received the oven it was discovered that it was an F655.  This is the European model.  The wiring is different and although the seller claims that it was installed in their US home, we decided that we should send it back to her rather than risk it.

So... I ended up purchasing 2 new Smeg FU655 ovens.

To the review:  The things are like works of art in the kitchen, simply stunning to look at.  We have a pretty active kitchen and we use both ovens nearly daily.  We continue to tweak our processes and take notes along the way on which settings work best for different applications.  Hopefully they will last for a long time and we will not have to repeat the process again while we are living in this house.

If there were anything I wish I would have known about the oven prior to purchasing, it would have been the noise level.  There is a fan that runs whenever the oven is on.  This fan cools the door cavity and there is a bit of air discharge out of the top and bottom of the door.  Another fan inside the oven runs when one of the convection modes is selected, but the inside fan is virtually silent compared to the main fan.  The door fan continues to operate after the oven is turned off.  I guess I don't know if this would have kept us from purchasing the Smeg, but had somebody mentioned the noise factor, I would probably have been more inclined to seek out this oven and other comparable ovens that were hooked up and operating in a showroom or home to witness the noise level 1st hand.