No, they don't need to match. If you look at photos people post here you'll see lots of kitchen that have done the perimeter cabinets in white and the island stained, often dark. Having the wood color in the GR is not a problem adjacent to a white kitchen.

It'll look perfect the way you have it planned. Kitchen cabinets in the greatroom? THAT would be tacky! (Not really--not with how nice kitchen cabs are in this era.) Something a bit more formal like stained wood is exactly what you want, although you'll probably want to be sure the styles are nice together if they're different.

There are some beautiful kitchens that have been shown here lately...some with wood perimeter cabinets/white island, some with wood lower cabinets and white upper cabinets. A warm white is often best, to compliment the wood tone, but there are many examples. If you do a search on 'wood and white cabinets' hopefully, more posts will show up :)

Not sure if this helps or not, but we're doing a mix of stain and creamy cabinetry in our kitchen, the trim is SW creamy throughout the house EXCEPT in the study which is stained. We have french doors to the study that are stained on both sides and they are the only stained doors in the house. Our built-ins are the same SW Creamy as the trim, EXCEPT the bead board in the back is stained, as is the mantle. Obviously, I love both stained and painted wood so it was important to me to have them both.

In your situation, I can't see why it wouldn't work to have a white kitchen and stained cabinets in an adjacent room. I think the key is to find a way to make the white kitchen warm, since stained wood is naturally warm. Just my very unprofessional 2cents :-)

Here are some pictures of our house (in progress).

Kitchen (all the granite is Brown Antique but some of it is covered with white paper)

Family Room

Study

Sounds great to me. The kitchen will look like kitchen, and the great room will look like a living/family room. You might want to coordinate styles, since they're open to each other, but no need to match finish.

Thanks, everyone. I will show DH. I need help with the layout and will try and post that between work projects today.

Cbusmom--Thanks for posting your pics. You've done an amazing job with your house. Can't wait to see the finished pics.

As others have posted, if it's done right, mixing cabinet finishes can be quite nice. We have done so in our kitchen renovation and are truly happy with it. We mixed painted and stained cabinetry. The family room, which is open to the kitchen, has a wet bar in the same stained finish as the kitchen. Here is the thread I posted a couple of days ago to share our progress. We'll have granite in this week and will post more pics.

http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/kitchbath/msg051847072703.html?26