Here is the completed kitchen. The cabinets were Thomasville cottage in natural cherry (available at your local Home Depot, who have great free design services). The key in making them look custom is to add "skins" to the outside to finish them nicely on sides facing you. We also added light rail along the bottom to hide the florescent lights under the cabinets and a modified crown moulding along the top, making the band a little thicker be adding in a section of "skin" between the crown, thin scribe moulding to hide the gap between cabinet and wall and light rail. The same pattern was pulled all the way around the kitchen to give it a nice consistent look. All this courtesy of some clever designing by Structural FX on site.
The counters are Tan Brown pre-fab granite. We ordered these from EMG out of Concord, CA mainly because they were the only ones with the 52" x 9 foot pre fab island. I have to say, buying pre fab is a huge savings if you can find stone you like, at least 1/3 the price of a custom stone job. EMG did all the slab cuts and cut out the sinks, faucets and built one side of the island bullnose on site. The tile you see along the back splash and under the vent is a copper tile. It's real copper in squares covers that are fitted over a ceramic base. It takes a special epoxy grout and sealer combo to finish it and once that is applied, there is no further maintenance and the copper should not change color.
The appliances - Sub Zero 601R refrigerator with stainless steel door, Sub Zero 601F Freezer overlaid in cherry to hide the unit near our mini office area, Sub Zero 424S under counter wine cooler which has a neat two zone control for whites and red, viking 36" range top with griddle already used several times now to make pancakes, Thermador microwave/convection combo double oven, Miele Incognito dishwasher, Vent a Hood 42" chimney vent, KitchenAid trash compactor and an additional GE microwave in the island near the refrigerator to heat up leftovers.
A few observations: the Sub Zero 424S is a little noisy especially at night you here it clicking on/off. The fridge and freezer are awesome with their layouts for storage inside. The Viking range kicks butt on heat and quickly cools down. The Vent a Hood magic lung is unbelievably cool - the smoke goes straight up, curls around into the side "magic lungs" and the grease gets pulverized - no cleaning, no smell at all. It's superb and the sales guy was absolutely right to say this is hands down the best in the industry and puts our previous high end Wold vent to shame. The Miele dishasher is so quiet you really have to put your ear next to it and listen carefully to hear that it started up. The top utensil tray takes a little getting used to as you cannot just plunk the utensils down, you have to organize them into little holders all stacked one after the other. Once you get used to it, it's ok and it makes emptying the dishwasher a lot easier. The unit does a great job at cleaning. No rinsing needed before putting the dirty dishes in. Having the extra microwave near the fridge is really nice. We use it all the time. The Insinkerator pro SS units in the sink work great - very quickly mashing up the mess. We're glad we chose the Grohe Europlus II faucets for the main sink and island. They work very well.
Our cabinet layout is working out great so far. We arranged to have all the cutlery and zip lock storage near the fridge and dishwasher. It makes putting leftovers away and packing kids lunches really easy. The only thing we miss is having a slide out type drawer under the range top. We got used to this at our rental house kitchen and it could not be done in our new kitchen because the range top has to sit pretty deep in the cabinet. We still have two shelves under there so it's fairly easy to pull out pots and pans. The narrow cabinet that is in the indented part where we sit has become the liquor cabinet, a good spot. We have all the baking stuff on the back side of the island next to the wine cooler. Having two sinks back to back is also working out great. The main sink, a deep and huge Franke stainless, can hold a mountain of dishes. The smaller Franke stainless in the island is great for food preparation. The double can recylcing cabinet next to the trash compactor makes it very easy to recycle but it tends to fill up rather quickly as it doesn;t hold that much. I don't think there is any good solution to this but ours works well.
The bay window in the middle provides fantastic light but we ordered some faux wood shades that are on the way as we have a view straight into our neighbors master bedroom due to the set back of the house. The four Hubbardton Kakomi pendant lights throw off a lot of light and are very elegant. I hate to think what electricity they are using up. We're fortunately mitigating this with our newly commissioned solar power system up and running for two days now. It's nice to see our electric meter turning backwards during the day!
Having a big pantry is something we should have always had. Easy to see everything you have so you stop buying duplicate products every week at the grocery store and you actually use things up more efficiently. It has adjustable shelves and stores a huge amount of food, small appliances and various other sundries. Access to the attic is through our pantry with a pull down door. Not the greatest spot for the door as it bumps into a lot of things but we didn't have much choice.
Overall we're very pleased. The only complaint is that because we ordered our kitchen in advance of the framing of the windows, we had to be a little too conservative on the width of our cabinets to allow slack for the bay window. Now that the window is in, we could have had much wider glass cabinets and this is where we store our dishes. I'll forever be reminded of that now since we have to open two doors to put a dish plate into the cabinet - darn it. In retrspect we should have waited to order these two cabinets until after the window went in.
