We went with a dark charcoal gray and light cream tile checkerboard pattern -- natural stone look but two contrasting colors arranged in a checkerboard pattern set on the diagonal. It's not installed yet, so I don't have pics, but I think it's going to look nice. We had the same dilemma with white cabs, marble counters and not doing a wood floor. Good luck.

Nothing wrong with white oak - I love the stuff, especially if it is quarter sawn. Quarter-sawn white oak has interesting rays in the grain like that found in old English oak. The link shows a photo, I know nothing about the website and it is not an endorsement. Here is a link that might be useful: Photo

sueb, I had been searching out Kashmir White (it was my alternate choice if I couldn't find the Bianco Romano.) I too will be having very dark wood cabs. The KW & BR are very close in colour tone. The main difference for me was the KW has the very fine tonal differences, and the BR is more coarse with chunkier deposits & veins. I think what won out was that the BR looked crisper & didn't have the more pronounced scattering of garnet spots that the KW had. If you go to the thread I had on the KW from a few days ago (updated today) & scroll down you'll see a post by gail428 you will see kashmir white used with her dark island. Here is a link that might be useful: another post about Kashmir White

Shoot, I didn't think you even had to heat in zone 8! I'm a chilly zone 4 (northern NY) and our only sources of heat are a woodstove and a pellet stove, so I have a little (LOL) experience with stoves. Before you get to decoration, though, you have to consider protection of combustible surfaces. You woodstove's manual will give you the minumum clearances between the back of the stove and the nearest adjacent walls. It's particularly important in the case of corner installations since the heat can get trapped in the angle. Please don't fudge these requirements. Some people think that if they apply a non-combustible surfacing to the wall then these distances don't matter. That's wrong, they still do because the noncombustible material will just transfer the heat to the (now) hidden combustible material behind. And then you've got Trouble. There are ways to reduce these distances (in some cases, see your manual for details) be using shield plates behind (and sometimes below) the stove and all the way up the back of the stovepipe to the thimble. To further reduce the distance, with some stoves, you can apply additional protection to the combustible surface by mounting a sheild about 1" off the wall, open on the top and bottom. We use a piece of cement board held off the wall with porcelain electric fence insulators centered on long screws. If you do a good job of countersinking the screws you can easily tile over the cement board, though this makes it impossible to remove it without destroying it. You can also paint it. Underneath the stove, you need to protect any combustible flooring and most wood stoves have a minimum size pad of non-cumbustible material to catch sparks and other debris. The simplest floor is a just a big, flat, rock slab like bluestone, granite, slate, or soapstone. My woodstove "hearth", really just a pad is made of (from the top surface): common bricks on edge over insulation board, laid over a bed of play sand contained in heavy plastic, then the wood floor. All surrounded by a an ogee-shaped moulding. The reason for the sand is that the hearth crosses the sill where two different buildings adjoin and the finish floor slopes more than two inches. Such are the joys of living in a very old house: floors you could ski down. If you're thinking of a wooden mantle, you may need a curved heat shield underneath it to protect the bottom surface - depends on how high it is off the top of the stove. That's why I prefer stone or rock mantles - they can't scorth! HTH, Molly~