Well....I definitely feel your pain. I had soffits around my perimeter and originally was encouraged by the contractor's first thoughts on ripping them all out. For complicated reasons (mainly placement of my chimney up through the center of the house and therefore routing of hvac around it) I could not get them ALL out, but like you was determined to find a way to at least take advantage of those I could get rid of. Your layout is indeed challenging and it's hard for me to see immediate solutions in two dimensions (I'd be better with elevation views--but there are others I would defer to on layout who know much more than I.) However, I thought I'd share these pics to help in visualization or maybe a little validation that there are creative solutions that can work.

For instance-here is the wall where I could get rid of half the soffit on the right side, but the left side needed to stay because hvac needed to travel around the chimney (the vertical bump out you see at the left of the picture) All outward appearances show no soffit...
{{!gwi}}

But, you can see here that it's an illusion :)
{{!gwi}}

And here's a photo of the fridge wall soffit, which at least was made shorter and narrower (again the chimney is what you see between the two runs)
{{!gwi}}

And finally, here is the view of the two walls (window and peninsula) where we were able to eliminate the soffits altogether.
{{!gwi}}
Hopefully others here will have some layout suggestions for you to minimize the "soffit effect." :)

Berf...Thanks so much for the inspiration, you ended up with a nice elegant solution...if my soffit was that small, I would be set! Are your soffits painted the same color as your wall? I can't quite tell from the photos.

I'm determined to make them smaller even if I have to keep them. I have elevations, but they don't show the soffit as my software can't do it.

Yes, the soffits and walls are the same color (a green called windchime) --these photos I posted are crummy in that they are blurry and don't show the color well ( I was rushing!)

Thanks berf...I thought it was a green. Any chance you can tell me how far out the soffit sticks out above the cabinets...from your photos it looks like it's 3 or 4 inches???

I was having a hard time understanding the question, but kept rereading it, and think I've got it now.

You will have slightly smaller soffits north and south (randomly assigned directions) and none east and west. But if you take out the soffits east and west you'll have a funky change in the cabinets in the angle on the window wall.

Is that right?

A lot of the solution depends on the cabinet style you choose. If you were looking for something Euro or rectilinear (which frankly doesn't really go with the shapes of your rooms), you might do something like covering the soffit with door material, or even creating false doors, or doors that cover the soffits as well as the boxes, a la Berf.

For more traditional cabinets, do a search for threads talking about staggered heights. It's very stylish right now to have different cabinets at different heights. If you make the one on the angle a little less deep than the one with no soffit, you can run the top molding right into the side of the latter so that you get a clean finish.

Or you could just use it as a point of interest and play it up. Like have a piece of decorative molding in the angle between the two heights, stairstepping up to point out where the height changes.

Good luck!

Pllog...you got it figured out. The cabinet style I'm with is a frameless white painted with a shaker door with bead detail on the inside and outside of the stiles and rails....kind of to mimic the beaded inset look, but get me more cabinet space and cheaper cabinets than inset.

I'm going to play around a little and try to post some elevations after the kids are in bed. I can't recreate the soffit, but I can stagger cabinet heights.

Ok, here's my elevation attempts. Of course no soffits, but I've stopped the top cabinets where the soffit would be. Keep in mind the soffit would have to kept over the window, but maybe not over the sink. So here you go, please ignore the backsplash countertop issue.

Beck, I think the fridge wall looks fine and you can hide the soffit or not as you please, no matter what you do on the other wall.

In fact, I think the whole thing will look fine. I like your small cabinets up on the range wall. If you can really make them line up with the bottom of the soffit, it seems to me that the best thing to do is to do false doors on the soffit, especially if you can take it out over the sink. If the cabinets have visible frames, put them on too, so that it really looks like the same top level cabinets.

You could also just paint the soffits to match the cabinets. I wouldn't do the angle/window wall soffit in wall color, because that will emphasize the step down.

Either way, you could do something different on the fridge wall pretty easily.

I'm a fan of clean lines, so I don't want to gunk it up, but another thing you could do is an angled lattice that matches the beading on the stiles and rails, on the soffits. Or hang a light sculpture. Or clad them with stainless to match the appliances. I mean, there are all kinds of things you could do, but the best way to carry your design all the way around, I think, is to run the cupboards up.

I have a weird soffit with pipes in my current laundry and pantry. It's just going to get enclosed in the new cupboards and go away. :)

hello again--
yes my soffit on the fridge/mw wall overhangs the cabinets by 3" HOWEVER--those uppers are 24" deep, so keep that in mind. My original soffit was 16" tall and 30" deep. The new one is about 10" tall and 27" deep. The same HVAC is running through it as before, the contractors just worked hard at routing it all tighter.

thanks Pllog and berf....I will need the soffit past the cabinets on the existing wall, into somewhere on the middle of the window (drawings above don't quite show the window.

I'm planning on doing some beadboard on the back of the pennisula and the end runs of the cabinets, so maybe I would figure out a way to work it in....my other thought was to make it look like a wood beam.

Do either of you think the two parralell soffits need to be equal in depth and height, or if I treated them differently (aesthetically) could they be different.

Thanks!

Beadboard could work, especially if it's the same color as the cabinets. The "beam" would work too, but it might not complement the design so well.

If you did the cabinet doors thing on the window wall, it wouldn't matter what you did on the fridge wall. If the soffits are noticeably soffits and you treat them differently, it should look okay (not gorgeous, but fine) if they're noticeably different.

If they're almost the same size and shape, but not quite, is where you'll run into problems. The eye will pick up the difference and wonder what's wrong without quite knowing it's because of the different sizes.

Try stepping back a few paces. Literally. Go to the far end of the breakfast room and look through the kitchen and remind yourself why you're removing soffits to begin with rather than just trying to solve the problem. Imagine what things would look like, ideally, if the soffits just vanished, and use whatever technique you can to get as close to that as possible.

Either that, or decide that the soffits are a feature of the house (they really do go with the double bay style, and are meant to delineate the kitchen area), and incorporate them into your plan rather than getting rid of them.

Thanks pllog...the problem with just keeping them is that in the new plan, the pennisula sneaks a couple inches from the nook. Also, beyond the nook is the family room, so the nook, family room and center of the kitchen all have 9' celings...the soffit makes the kitchen feel significantly smaller because the ceiling ht undr it is only a little over 7'. I am considering just taking out the one between the nook and the kitchen, I really wanted the impact of a tall wall of cabinets on the cooktop wall as that it what you see (and the angled corner) when you enter the nook/kitchen.

I definitely would lean toward removing wherever you are able--get as close to your original vision as you can--and I agree with everything pllog said about the two parallel soffits. My first choice would probably be hiding one behind a cabinet treatment and just dealing with the other...or at least making them significantly different from one another...
I wouldn't just leave them. You'll be happier without even half of them! I can't believe how much airier it feels in my kitchen with those extra few inches up top (and I only have 8 foot ceilings!)

Our original architect --before we realized we could reduce the size of the fridge wall soffit--drew a beautiful curved version of the soffit that became a design element in and of itself--we really really wanted it ...it looked so great in the drawings. Then the contractor pointed out I could have a few more inches of space in cabinets, and less crowding up there overall...so we didn't need to gussy up the soffit any longer. It was a beautiful alternative if we hadn't been able to eliminate and reduce them overall.

Thanks for the encouragement berf! I know I can come up with something. Between the GC, the cabinet guy, my interior designer, and GW, I will make this work!