Ever hear of "fun tack"? It's a blue silly-putty-ish substance for temporarily fastening things. (Like artwork to the wall.) I've been using it to put hardware on my cabinets, sometimes for days, to see which looks best. You could try this and see which orientation speaks to you. Good luck!

@MaWizz - your second picture was one of my inspiration photos. And although I wanted cabinets like in that second picture, I knew they would likely get trashed quickly with kids actively using the kitchen. My second choice was tab pulls but was talked out of it from a pure functionality standpoint. In a working kitchen with kids it is easier to pull handles (using one clean pinky finger of an otherwise drippy dirty hand). Finally, when I asked a local designer she said handles are like buttons on a shirt. She felt the kitchen needed that accent as it's not an ultra-modern kitchen - but rather more transitional. Hope that helps.

I'm leaning toward the bottom. Thanks for the inputs. Florantha, we have noticed the way the black panels echo the TV (when off) and like that too. Dianalo, I started out thinking I'd use bigger knobs, but after looking at a lot of furniture, I realized that furniture pieces often use much small knobs - a lot smaller than the hardware typical in today's kitchens (especially GW forum kitchens where big hardware has been increasing in popularity even since we did our kitchen 5 years ago). This is pretty typical. In Fine Woodworking, the knobs on just about everything were quite small. We are going for a furniture look here. We wanted wood knobs and weren't pleased with what was available retail in wood knobs and pulls - they aren't finely shaped. I guess most furniture makers make their own or have access to better ones wholesale. The knobs my DH turns have a much more refined pleasing shape IMO. muskokasp, I've had doors with no pulls before and over 20 years or more, there can be wear around the edge where it is usually grabbed so I'd rather have pulls. The component stack middle door is opened fairly often because the DVD player is behind it. We considered making the pulls out of cherry rather than walnut so they would blend more, but we like the dark walnut contrast to the cherry. One good thing about knobs - if we decide after having these in place that it is too busy with the walnut, we could make cherry knobs to replace them. Or buy some other knob altogether - no hole spacing to worry about. Stacy, we have had 7 stage 2 no burn days in a row. :( Last season there were only 3 in the whole season. We can burn when it is stage 1 because of the EPA phase II low emissions level. I hope this clears up soon. Oh well, we still enjoy the room. Suzannes, in some ways, planning for our surround was fairly easy because we knew from the beginning that we wanted to use the stone from our kitchen to tie the two parts of the room together. But it still took some planning on how to use our remnants to cover the area. We are lucky that the grain is a bit swirly rather than linear because we didn't have much granite left. The top and one side came from the same piece with their long directions running parallel to each other. Our GC's fabricator did a great job of getting the seams pretty tight and cutting for a pretty good pattern match between the top piece and the sides. The other thing was that we didn't have a large enough piece for the hearth extension - we had one that was wide enough for the fireplace's safety requirements but it would have been a few inches shorter than than the surround width. That was fortuitous because it caused us to consider a black granite for that and I think it looks better with the black hearth tying into the black fireplace and grounding it than it would have with a matching stone hearth.

Thanks for the input. Near unanimous to rely on my tin-eye to position the pulls. It is telling me to center the holes and let the body of the pull sit above the vertical center of the drawer. So that's what I'll do. I guess if it looks wrong later on I can get a slightly wider cup pull and position it lower covering the old holes. Thanks again, Barry