Don't feel you have to enforce vertical symmetry with the need to line the coolers up with the stacked bottles. If slightly wider ones are cheaper and would work, the go with that without a qualm. And i think having them the same dimension actually weakens the overall design, a bit. You'll notice that in colored picture, the bottle stack and the cooler doors don't line up, and it still looks well-balanced. Notice, too, that there's even an optical illusion-created discordance between the stacked bottle rack on the right and the strongly vertical-orientation of the glass-paneled doors to the left on the other side of the TV. So just making those two sides match didn't result in an eye-sweet balance, no matter what the tape measure may say. In your case, I think the strong apparent verticality of the coolers' slab doors may make them seem narrower than they actually are, creating a top heavy look to the wine racks above. This violates the general sense we have that things should be bolder, and stronger-appearing on the base, and successive layers should get lighter, narrower, smaller, or whatever. In our second drawing, with the coolers moved inward, the optical-illusion of their narrowness is resolved. Also it may just be artefacts of the layout but the D-shaped raised trim pattern on the sides of the narrow lower doors strikes me as unattractive. Also door hinging should be book-matched, or disguised to look that way. HTH L.

I'm not a fan of seeing hinges, so I like inset cabinets with concealed hinges but not so much the ones with visible hinges. (With concealed hinges you can change your knobs and pulls and not worry about matching the finish of the hinges.) This is a bit speculative, but it seems that inset doors could require a higher quality of craftmanship because they are tightly fitted within the opening. If a door is just slightly off or a hinge is loose (causing the door to hang crooked) I think you'd notice it more with inset than overlay because you'd see the dark inside of the cabinet through the space between the door and the frame. Neither of these would prevent me from getting inset; just things I've noticed.

I like partial overlay. In my last home, I had partial overlay in my kitchen, living room built-ins and office cabinetry. They were all custom cabinets. The house was a tiny (880 s.f.) 1960's box near the beach. There wasn't much dictating style for the neighborhood (we had a flat roof and our neighbors were in an 1800's Victorian), so we just did what we wanted. In my current home, we have inset cabinets in the kitchen, which I love, but I think if we didn't have a budget for the inset I would have gone with partial overlay again. I just like the look. I think the above examples are beautiful. Here are a few examples from my previous home of partial overlay (sorry, only one kitchen example). This was our living room. We installed the fireplace and surrounding cabinets which were partial overlay. This was a Tuff Shed that we turned into a detached office. Our lot size was only 2200 s.f. so space was tight! The previous owners had installed the shed, but when I was pregnant with our daughter, we turned the shed into our office with custom partial overlay cabinets. Here is the partial overlay kitchen cabinetry (and laundry room beyond) that was installed by the previous owner.

I'm really liking the two tone look lately. I'm debating about it for my cabin's kitchen, so of course I had to search for some examples. Here are few I found. This one is my favorite! Here are a few from GW that did the wood fridge surround which I like. I'm not sure though if in a smaller kitchen whether or not it would be better for all the uppers to flow with the fridge surround??? Hopefully others will chime in. Here is one with white around fridge and oven stack. I like both! But I am leaning toward the wood surround myself. I really think it's more just personal preference though because both look nice. I would also consider how much natural light your kitchen has as that might make you lean toward white. If you could post pictures of your existing space that would help us give the best advice.