If you stagger the heights of the crown, you really need to use staggered depths as well. Each piece of crown needs a place/cabinet end to land or butt into. There are some examples where it hasn't been done and the crown has been 'cut back'. I definately wouldn't reduce the size of my upper cabinets - anything less than 12" deep is useless in my opinion. I used 15" depths on the taller cabinets and pulled the big units (pantry, oven, etc) out even more. I don't have a picture of my kitchen on this computer but here are two links to examples. The first is to a GW kitchen (don't know whose it is) that shows the different depths and how the crown works. The second is another GW kitchen that shows only staggered depths and cut back trim.

{{!gwi}}

{{!gwi}}

On additional thought- Be sure to check the depth/projection of your crown. I decided to use 2 piece crown everywhere and almost ran into a problem!

Hope this helps!
Nancy P

Scrappy...In the photos you posted, he is referring to the cabinets above the stove on either side of the microwave. See how the crown molding stops and makes a 90-degree turn before it gets to the cabinets next to it? Just like the 2nd link nkkp posted.

We did staggered heights and also staggered the depths (very similar to the cream kitchen in the 1st link nkkp posted), but we still ran into an "issue"...With full overlay cabinets, the cabinet doors on the cabinets that are 12-inches deep hit the cabinets next to them when the open all the way up. For instance in Nkkp's first link, see the cabinet to the right of the angled corner cabinet? When you open the cabinet to the right, its door will hit the angled wall cabinet bc the hinges open more than 90-degrees. To fix this we could have (1) avoided full overlay styles, (2) included a spacer between the cabinets, which kind of defeats the look of full-overlay styles, or (3) get hinges that will stop at 90-degrees or just slightly less than 90-degrees so the hinge stops the door, not the cabinet next to it. Other poster have put those clear bumpers in inconspicuous placed to cushion it. We are currently on a search for different hinges and hope that solves our problem. Just wanted to point this out...I am sure we will get used to it, but it is kind of annoying.

Thank you to both of you! Nkkp, those pictures you posted are really helpful. I think the original link did not show the details well enough but yours are great. And merimom, thanks for explaining about the problem with opening the cabinet doors. Good thing to look out for.