I think you are going at it the right way. Stay with the same crown and do your best to match the stain. You won't get it exact, but you should be able to come very close. With pine it is very important that it be sealed prior to staining. There are several methods of accomplishing this, and a lot depends on the type of stain you are using. Find the stain that most closely matches the cabinets. Often this means buying from cabinet company, but not always. If you look at, say a Minwax sample board, they often show how each stain will look on different wood species. Find the one on pine that comes closest to your cabinets. With some stain brands you can even mix different ones together if you need to, and they often come in small cans so the cost is not too high. Get some pieces of 1 x 3 pine about a foot long, seal them, and then after they dry start to experiment. Begin with just wiping on a very light coat of stain, let dry, then add a second or third, etc., unitl your satisfied. Remember that when you put on a finsh coat of poly the stain will look darker. You can aproximate what this might be by wetting the sample after the stain has dried, or apply a coat or two of poly to the sample you think looks the best. It's not rocket science and you can come very close. Remember, the crown is not at eye level, so slight differences won't be as noticeable. Here is a good article on matching. Here is a link that might be useful: Stain Matching

Our kitchen is cream colored cabinets with a glaze, walls are SW Nomadic Desert, and trim is Valspar Cream in my Coffee. This photo has some baseboards and door casings in it. Where the door casing is next to the cabinet on the left side, you can see the difference: trim is brighter, cabinets more yellow. We've painted all the trimwork in our house the same color, not something different in the kitchen.

I'm headed to Benjamin Moore to try for a color match using their matching equipment. I have never loved a color matched paint before... but there seems to be no choice in the matter. I am told the rules are that you MUST match the trim to the cabinets... and I dare not accidentally introduce some new/different undertones OR ELSE! I anticipated choosing white wall and trim paint would be easy - HA! Nope. Apparently, there are six thousand white paint colors. And the rules of engagement are TIGHT. I'm sitting here with a sample piece of cabinet and four color decks from BM and SW. None of the whites look like a match. And, sorry to say, the Pure White by SW mentioned above? It looks especially mismatched to Kraftmaid Dove White. I wish Kraftmaid would either let their color formula out or provide healthier paint options. My Kraftmaid cabinet doors all came smelling like fresh spraypaint and needed to be remediated with a hydroxyl generator before they stopped making my VOC meter sing! KM certainly needs to step up their supposed "twice oven cured" process. Anyhow, it was terrible, and I want nothing to do with bringing a fresh Kraftmaid gallon of nightmares in to our home. I want matching trim, not the VOC levels of a meth lab.

Thanks for all the replies! I really appreciate having so many virtual friends to help! DH will go today to meet w/ kitchen designer, OK the door swap in person, and get the show back on the road. Christmas dinner will be in the crock pot, but that's OK, we're moving forward. I am posting some pics of the counter/backsplash samples on the other thread, but here's one anyway (can't resist). Tile size on left (11/2 x 1/2) is the shape, but the squares on the right show the tile color. It does look different on the card here than it did on the sample board in the showroom. I liked the sample board a lot better. Here's a picture from sonoma tilemakers' website. It's the same tile, in a 1/2 x 1/2 - color is jade. The color I chose is called minka. This just shows the reflectiveness of it. Here's the minka from their website. Sorry it's so small, I couldn't seem to enlarge it. It's got more grays/taupes/blues in it. What do you think? Be HONEST, please. Suzanne