I have an 18 inch cabinet stacked over a 33 inch with 5 inch crown. Our ceilings are just shy of 9 feet. Here is a photo of the boxes installed. Hopefully the doors will be going in tomorrow. I am a bit OCD on having things match up, so I personally wouldn't choose to have muntins in a single cabinet. Maybe consider doing the entire 36 inch cabinet in glass? I am too messy to do that, but in other's kitchens when used as a focal point it can look nice to break up the wall of wood. I tend to agree with the previous posters that a 13 inch may be too small. Once you add the door frames, the amount of glass showing will be tiny.

Most cabinet lines offer a 39" tall wall cabinet now. That will only require a 3" space to fill with crown. If you're using cabinets that can be custom modified to any height....you can make the uppers whatever you like. However, with unlevel floors and ceilings, I highly recommend the use of a 2pc crown (profiled flat stock + crown) Tips: If you are using INSET or PARTIAL OVERLAY cabinets, these are much easier to apply crown molding to (up to the ceiling). It gives you a little flat space to attach the molding to. If you are using FRAMELESS or FULL OVERLAY, then you definitely need a 2 pc crown combination!! If modern slab doors, you can just use a flat top molding.

Hi Mags...my house is almost at the drywall stage so way too late for the counterhight window but I seriously considered it at one time. I love the look. i did heed the advice of the crank out window. They are casement windows. The architect drew in 3 windows and I gave up one to get more upper cabinets. I hope I don't regret that when it's all done. we (kd) called modernaire and I'm working on a hood. We shall see. Thank you for the advice!

Hi all, thank you all so much, and my apologies for this delayed response. We are our own GCs (by financial necessity; gut-rehabbing the entire house and currently carrying two mortgages, soooo...) and are now neck-deep finishing demo, with the plumber set to start on Monday. We just purchased all of our kitchen appliances this evening, so things are moving fast! I took into account several of your suggestions--THANK YOU--and will post revised layout once designer sends it back. A few of the things we did were to enlarge the window (yay), swap the European hood (my husband's default) with a standard hood (I'm sure there's a term I don't know for that) that can be hidden to allow for a much more cohesive overall cabinet look, and pare back the bulky cabinets on either side of the hood. To address a few of the suggestions we won't be taking--although I certainly understand the logic behind them: I like the cleaner look of no sink in the island, so will be sticking with the counter sink. As far as both the lack of prep space and the location of the dishwasher, I guess neither bothers me because 1) we don't see any problem with prepping at the island, with so much space there and the pull-out garbage right there. We have two sets of friends who are avid cooks and do all their prep at their islands--no prep sink--and are not bothered by any lack of functionality (perhaps just learned habits?), so talking with them helped us embrace that idea. 2) We tend to unload the dishwasher first thing in the am, so it doesn't get much use except during clean-up, so I don't see it being a hindrance during meal prep (we have a tiny kitchen at our current house, and strangely, that's never been one of our maaaany issues with the cramped space). 3) We both really like the built-in microwave/oven combo, and my husband is also a big fan of a separate cooktop, so those are staying. As for not posting a 2D pic, sorry, I was doing a cumbersome process of taking pics of the pdf files and uploading them as images, so I didn't get around to that one. I'm sure my husband and I will be reminded of the words of our carpenter friend, who said as we were starting all of this, "I always tell people to build two houses: the first, and then the second one in which you get to fix all of the mistakes you made in the first." Anyway, thanks again. I appreciate the thought and effort you all put into responding!!