Is Our Place's pastel coloured air fryer a wonder or a gimmick? I tested it to find out

Working at Ideal Home, it's little surprise that I love snooping on pretty houses. When doing that, I've noticed there's one piece of cookware that has become ubiquitous in Instagrammable kitchens: the Our Place Always Pan. Available in a range of divine pastel colours, and with multi-functionality built-in, its popularity is undoubted.

The success of that pan has informed the release of the Our Place Wonder Oven, the brand's first-ever air fryer. Available in four colours (Steam, Char, Blue Salt and Spice), just one look at it will tell you why, in the US, it's enjoyed the same social media success as the pan, with a design that makes it look like a perfectly formed toy oven, rather than a boring black box.

But I know you're not here to just learn about how this air fryer looks, which is why I put it to the test in my own kitchen to see how its performance stacked up against all of the other best air fryers I've tested. Here's how I got along with this uber cute, Easy Bake Oven lookalike air fryer.

Our Place Wonder Oven review: product specs

• Capacity: 12 litres
• Modes: Air Fry, Bake, Toast, Roast, Reheat, Grill
• Weight: 5.3kg
• Power: 1400W
• Dishwasher safe parts: yes
• Size: 29.5 x 29.2 x 26.9 cm (h x w x d)

Unboxing and first impressions

The Our Place Wonder Oven arrived in a suitably pretty box, with the air fryer inside wrapped in a plastic bag. Usually, this would be a drawback for me, but in this case, the plastic wrapping is nice enough that you could feasibly repurpose it for something else.

The box itself, like the oven, is small, and one person could carry it with ease. The oven comes with a baking tray (in the same colour as the exterior of your oven), an air fryer basket, a wire rack and a crumb tray.

The crumb tray slots into the bottom of the oven to catch anything that drops down during cooking, but you can otherwise choose the formation of the other racks day to day. The bake pan has a toxin-free nonstick coating, and the pastel colour of it is a fun touch.

All in all this oven has six functions. It air fries, bakes, toasts, roasts, 'broils' and reheats. Broil is the US term for grill. Another added bonus with this air fryer oven is that it has a steam element, activated by pouring a cap full of water into an opening at the top of an oven. It's best used, according to the brand, to add fluffiness back into bread and moisture back into meat.

As this is a countertop style air fryer, it uses a multi-level design, which allows you to cram more in on different accessories, such as using the baking tray and air fryer tray at the same time.

As it turns out, I'm not the only member of the Ideal Home team who has tested the Our Place Wonder Oven, with several of the team trying it out at home. It's fairly unanimous among us that this is the best-looking air fryer on the market at the moment.

The design is so favourable that it even persuaded our Content Editor Holly Cockburn to make space for an air fryer in her home, something she's been steadily resisting despite my best efforts for a couple of years now. Here's a picture of the oven in her home.

Cooking tests

The Wonder Oven comes with a recipe booklet, which I love for encouraging first-time air fryer users to get started, so I gave a few of the recipes a go.

Baking

The first recipe I tried was cookies, which meant I was reaching for my non-stick tray. It's a fairly small tray, but you can buy another one from the Our Place website if you want to maximise space. It's also toxin-free, which is an important fact as people become more conscious about forever chemicals.

I combined my cookie dough and set out four portions onto the non-stick tray. Setting the timings and temperature for the oven is easy, all you need to do is turn each dial, but it's not as specific as with other, more advanced air fryers.

I've tested a lot of air fryers, so I've become accostmed to usinng a touch screen in most cases so that you can set a specific amount of minutes. For cookies like these, setting a specific number of minutes is quite important to prevent overbaking, which is where guessing at where the 8-minute mark might be was a little bit concerning.

This air fryer also doesn't have a preheat setting, something I find very useful on my usual model. The brand says it should take just 2 and a half minutes to reach optimal temperature, but again, that's quite a tricky time to select using just the dial, which is also quite stiff straight out of the box.

I set the timer as best as I could and popped the cookies in.

Depsite my reservations, the timings worked out mostly fine, and the cookies were baked well (done on the outside but still a little gooey inside). The final result of the cookies could definitely have been improved by more specific timings, which might be a dealbreaker for some people.

The thing I was most impressed with during this test was the non-stick tray, and getting the cookies off of the sheet was easy.

Grill

Next up, I gave the gochujang salmon from the recipe booklet a go. This is a recipe that chiefly involves using the grill function, for about 15 minutes in total. Firstly, after marinating the salmon, I set it to the bottom level of the oven on the non-stick tray for 10 minutes. I then re-coated the salmon and set it to the top level for 5 minutes.

The results were great and the grill was really speedy to heat. Whilst the grill worked quickly, the salmon was still well cooked without drying out. Again, despite the dark staining on the pastel coloured tray, cleaning off the excess was as simple as a little bit of soapy water, which is impressive.

I've also used the grill function to melt cheese pretty regularly, including on burgers and toast, and it's much more convenient than using my oven. This function has the seal of approval from me.

Air fry

The function I've used the most, by far, is the air frying, as it speeds up the time I have to spend cooking by at least a third every time. One test I did was cooking two pieces of fresh fish, which wouldn't have taken long in a conventional oven, but was done in the blink of an eye in this air fryer.

For the fish, I again used the non-stick tray, but after that, for the following air fryer tests, I switched to using the air fryer basket instead. This is a mesh tray which advances the effect of circulating air in your air fryer, and I've used it a lot for cooking meat, such as chicken, and things like chips and hash browns.

The chips I've cooked with this air fryer have had a really lovely crisp exterior while remaining fluffy inside, though the limiting factor with this air fryer on this test is the size. The air fryer basket isn't huge, so you're limited to cooking two portions at a time, which will create problems for family cooking.

Toast

This is the function I tested the steam setting on, with great effect. I used it several times to refresh day-old bread, and found that the steam that was released really did work well to reinvigorate it. I've also tried it out a few times for toast in the mornings, and while it's effective at getting the job done, it's simply not as convenient as using my toaster.

Reheat

This oven is smaller than you likely imagine it is, which means that standard plates and other equipment might not perfectly fit inside. I actually own tableware from the same brand (which I love), including a plate bowl set (£75 from Our Place) and I do like the fact that this oven has been designed for this to fit inside, but if your plates are bigger, you might be out of luck for receptacles for reheating.

As I wrote about in my feature on switching my microwave for this air fryer, due to the small size of this oven, getting it up to a high temperature to reheat things is very quick. I use this air fryer most days to reheat things, alongside with the grill element.

Cleaning

The oven design of this air fryer means that I've found it much easier to keep clean than other models I've tried. As you're cooking directly onto the trays, it's an obvious reminder that you need to wash them up, unlike an air fryer basket that might get left a little longer than is optimal.

It's the same with the inside walls of this air fryer, which you're much more up close and personal with than the inside of your built-in oven. Luckily, cleaning the parts is as easy as soap and water, and the walls of the internal oven can be cleaned just as you'd clean your normal oven. I was surprised when the window pane on the oven was also easy to wipe down and hasn't clouded over, even though I live in a hard water area.

How does it compare to similar models?

The Our Place Wonder Oven costs £195 at the time of writing. By comparison, our top-rated small air fryer ever is the Ninja Air Fryer MAX PRO 6.2L AF180UK, and is currently available for £129. It scored 5 stars during our review and has those fancier features that this oven is missing, like a more complex cotrol panel and the ability to change the temperature down to the degree. If you don't mind the way that your air fryer looks, and think you might prefer a drawer design (which is easier to shake), then this Ninja is a good alternative.

If you like the idea of a countertop oven, but want more space to work with, we also awarded five stars to Sage's Smart Oven Air Fryer, which also includes a slow cook option. It's a premium buy, but it's big enough to cater to a family too, on the flip side.

Should you buy the Our Place Wonder Oven?

The negatives with this oven are as follows: the lack of preheat setting combined with the dial controls means that there's more guesswork than with your bog standard air fryer, there's no all-singing, all-dancing features, and it's too small for cooking lots of portions at once.

Depsite these drawbacks (if you do find them to be limiting factors), I really like this air fryer. It's design totally won me over, and though this might be more related to my air fryer testing fatigue than anything, I warmed to it because of the simplicity of it overall. I'm looking forward to seeing if the brand releases it in new colours, or if new accessories are released down the line. If you like the look of this air fryer, and are willing to lose out on things like a touch control panel, it'll make a suitably cute, high-performing addition to your kitchen.