Deedles, we put plain oak in our utility room. I'm not against plain oak cabinets at all, but they can be overpowering if there are a lot of cabinets. The stain the cabinet maker used on these is SW chestnut, and it looks more red in person. No underlying yellow at all. if you don't want the oak to absorb too much stain, thus reducing the visible graining, you first need to "fill" the grain. That can be done with a light coat of varnish or shellac or diluted solvent. Or even using gel stain. Your cabinetmaker is the best person to ask about this.

Linelle: your description perfectly captures the difference between my sample and what I'm looking for! My sample is flat and lifeless. What I want is for the wood to look rich and alive. The example I chose may be red oak. I know white oak can be just as lively as red oak though. There are plenty of QS white oak photos that look rich and full of figure. It's the rift white oak that I cannot find good photos of! ILoveRed: I have seen the photo of the tall cabinets in the first kitchen and it is gorgeous! It doesn't show the detail of the wood as clearly as I need but I'll add it to my photos. The second kitchen you found has some really good photos. Thanks so much for finding that for me! omelet: I'm not an expert either but I agree with you - the cut determines the figure of the wood more than the finish. But take a look at the figure on the unstained backside of my sample door: Unstained, it has a lot of wonderful richness and unexpected fleck in too. If they didn't leave the backside unstained I would have never known that RS white oak could look so lively and have such lovely figure. In one of my other threads, we seem to have figured out that they used a mix of woods and cuts on this sample door. The side rails look like RS white oak, top and bottom rails QS white oak and center panel is plain sawn red oak. That's a fantastic suggestion to post on the flooring forum! Off I go...

Wow, those tiles will be stunning! Yes, great minds think alike lol. It’s nice we found each other, Houzz can be a lonely place when you aren’t doing a white shaker with marble look counters. There is absolutely nothing wrong with white and marble and when done right it’s beautiful- but it would be so so wrong with my house and my existing furniture and decor. My house is a 70s contemporary and since it has lots of natural stone, medium brown woodwork and exposed beams, the Mission style works very well with it. Having said that, I also thought a slavish reproduction of Mission/Arts and Crafts wouldn’t fit, but incorporating some of those elements was my goal. My parents were both antique collectors and a lot was passed down to me, so my decor is a lot of Mission but with some Empire, Eastlake walnut, and a few 60s-70s pieces thrown in the mix, in homage to my “contemporary of its time” house. My eclectic/eccentric style, for lack of a better term, isn’t something I see much in the modern HGTV world, but I often find inspiration in real estate photos from England, where I used to live, where being eccentric eclectic is a more accepted way of life :)

If you don't specify what you get will be "run of the tree" as it were, a mixture of plain sawn, rift, and quarter depending on which part of the tree it came from and the angle of the cut relative to the growth rings. There are ways the sawyer can optimize yield of rift/quartersawn, but it's very wasteful, hence expensive. The other approach is to sort the boards after they are cut. There will be relatively few quartersawn, again resulting in a higher price. Heres a good diagram. Unfortunately your installer wasn't paying any attention to grain, a very, very common problem in almost everything made of wood (and the reason that most factory cabinets and furniture are drenched in nearly opaque stain). He should either have intermixed the boards with different patterns (the typical solution) or sorted them using the QS wood someplace special or reselling it at a substantial markup.