"preferable place" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is typically used to describe a location or setting that is more desirable or advantageous than another. Example: "I think the park is a preferable place to have a picnic because it has a lovely view and plenty of shade."
There are certainly more preferable places to be than Detroit in late December, but the University of Connecticut football players would like nothing better than to spend the holidays there, away from their families, freezing in the Michigan winter.
Pores on or under the surface were preferable places for crack initiation.
The new model of the searching syser that has the control system for regulation of movement toward preferable places in the environment has been proposed and analyzed.
Preferable places are down at your desk, past the teacher or just in front of you.
Also, it seems preferable to place all the blame for Lumumba's wrongful arrest on Knox, once again, rather than on the people who actually made the wrongful arrest so quickly and so carelessly.
Or perhaps it is preferable to place ILL beside circulation staff, to promote patron-driven acquisitions and better customer service?
In theory, it is preferable to place the fixator rail parallel to the mechanical axis so that lengthening does not induce a displacement of this axis.
It is preferable to place mismatches at least 3 bp from the termini of the probe target duplex.
Although it is preferable to place the amplitude grating on the image plane, experimentally it was more convenient to maintain a space of 68 mm between the amplitude grating and the image detector.
While we put most interpretive weight on models that did not control for metropolitan area, it may have been preferable to place more weight on findings from models with control for metropolitan area if it had been possible to accomplish that without dramatically reducing variability in exposure.
