your kitchen design is beautiful!! Thank you for sharing the photo. It really helps me visualize a tray ceiling.

A tray ceiling is just a fancy accepted word for a big soffit. It’s generally too expensive to retrofit into an 96” ceilinged home. That requires structural work. A new build just frames up a taller ceiling and puts in a soffit to lower it.

The kitchen seems awfully large in proportion to the rest of the space. Are you open to changes to improve this design? Who is doing the design work here?

Gosh, I was struggling to figure out what the weird cigarette with smoke and an ash tray in the 2d was all about. Haha! That's what I get for looking at this stuff on my phone.

If you're open to layout suggestions, please say so.

Sure, I'd love your thoughts! We have 6 kids and all their friends congregate here--I have an Aga that I'm incorporating as well as needing to be able to remove it and take it with me when we move without it impacting the rest of the kitchen. It's 58.5 inches. Thanks!

Are you planning on doing the tray ceiling around the entire 29.5' x 26.5' room?

The beams will go whichever way the engineer tells you they have to go.

Can someone help me understand, on an 8ft ceiling, it’s possible to dig in a tray, correct? Like Chris’s beautiful example above. Does anyone know the cost of this versus doing a full ceiling raise job for like $25,000? Looking for a less expensive alternative for a 25 x 30 living/dining combo currently at 8 foot ceilings.

It depends on a lot of factors including labor costs in your area and the whole approach. In a relatively straightforward case, for a 25x30 living dining room situation, we can assume that it is not more than half the house, that it is a gabled roof, that there is attic space above the room, that the electrical work is straightforward, there isn’t a air conditioning unit or ceiling mounted HVAC above the space, we are looking at about $10000 including the permits, engineering, and general contracting to manage the project. As you can see there are a lot of things that are site specific to determine pricing and that the only way to get an estimate is to bring someone in to see your specific situation and to be open to options presented.

I like @Andrea C’s explanation and the various things she said you have to think about that could impact the project. But I would change the “$10,000” she mentioned to be “$10,000 to start”. I.e., it won’t be less than that, but could be higher, or even much higher, depending on what the specific home structure is.