WSR, if you interested to do the design of your kitchen in the 3D environment so you can see how it will look using different options, drop me please a message here with your email and I will provide you with all the details.

This way you can see your entire kitchen as you standing in it and you can visualize the layout and see which design you like best. I did this for quite a few people and everyone found this very beneficial.

Thanks and good luck.

Why do you want 12' high ceilings in your kitchen?

What are your cooking habits?

What types of meals do you cook?

Do you need a prep sink?

Why do you have cabinets beside your refrigerator?

I would put the built in coffee machine where you want it and/or will use it.

Dining may be a good use for the area near the dining area.

Configure the pantry with shelves on the wall, with heavy food and kitchen stuff near the bottom and lighter food and kitchen stuff near the top. The sink will work good for mixing drinks while looking for the food and kitchen stuff for dinner. Eliminating the refrigerator is okay if you want your drinks neat. Put a revolving bookcase between the pantry and the office, could be useful.

Seeing the remainder of the first floor plan may be helpful in evaluating the kitchen layout, not to mention we can see if you will have to go through your master bathroom to get to you master closet(s).

Is this a custom house? How much can you change -- move walls -- move rooms?

Yes, this is custom and we can make changes.

With a 12-foot ceiling you have a few choices:

1. "Float" your cabinets on the wall and leave a very large open space above the upper cabinets. These will gather dust, and as the photos above clearly show, the kitchen will appear that the architecture and the kitchen design were never fully coordinated; 2) Add soffits to make it appear that kitchen, cabinets and architecture were coordinated; 3) Drop your ceiling in the kitchen, to make it appear that there was some forethought about how things integrated together; 4) Run cabinets to the 12-foot ceiling, even though you won't be able to access them (but the cabinet manufacturers and installers will thank you for enabling their children to attend college); 5) Put this in the kitchen forum and get ready for the responses.

Good luck with your project.

Thanks for posting your pictures - looks great! We have 10 foot sliders in the Dining Area and Great Room that look out over the river so we have 12 foot ceilings in those rooms and the kitchen. Like the mix of the wood with the proposed shelves and table and the cement floors.

You need to post your kitchen in the kitchen forum. What I see right now is that your kitchen is a walk through from one side of the house to the other and it's especially bad because it's where your cooktop is.

Can you post the full floor plan?

I agree with moving the refrigerator out of the pantry and putting it in the kitchen. The current refrigerator location is problematic in a circulation spot with too little room between it and the island.

I would recommend soffits to enclose the space above the cabinets. This will also help with lighting the kitchen. Floating cabinets are dust and grease collectors. Noxious muck that's impossible to clean. Forget about putting anything decorative above them unless you want to take it all down and clean it at least once a month.

Hubbell Copley Residence · More Info

Hubbell Copley Residence · More Info

Thank you Virgil,PPF,and cpartist. The island and cooktop are centered on the great room and the right entry/hallway into the kitchen leads from the garage/2 bedrooms. Entry and foyer are off of great room. I will take your suggestion and post over in the Kitchen Forum.Thank You!

Summit, I think maybe we should consider nixing the second refrigerator and increasing the size of the main refrigerator. Grunge on top of the cabinets doesn't sound appealing and I know I will not keep it clean. I like the pictures of the soffits you posted especially the light feature. How much room should there be between the fridge and island to alleviate circulation issue? Are you thinking it would be tight with multiple people working in the kitchen? TY

No one needs 12’ ceilings in a workroom. It makes lighting and venting difficult. And cabinetry costs triple what it would be with a sane 102” ceiling that actually works WITH available height cabinets to give you better storage and no dust bunnies.

You also have a airport runway of danger of people going straight through the middle. That is a fault of the house plan’s architecture and rigid ideas of symmetry that are detrimental to functionality.

Its not good. The kitchen. And what can be seen of the House too. Are you working with a drafter? Or an actual architect?

Can anyone see my comments??

Yes Mark Bischak, we can, where you start the post "Why do you want 12' high ceilings in the kitchen?" Exactly my question. It won't add to the attractiveness of the kitchen, and will actually detract from a kitchen's coziness and welcoming feeling. You have to install an exhaust hood and the ducting with 12' ceiling will be awkward. Sophie mentioned lighting - yup! And, a towering row of exceedingly tall cabinets will look more like the Library in Game of Thrones. To the OP - how about 10' instead. That is still taller than most kitchens' ceilings.

Thanks for your comments. We have an open concept with the great room, dining, kitchen and foyer all tying together. The dining room and great room walls facing the back of the property are 10' glass sliding doors thus the very tall ceilings. The house will be in Florida and most of the new models in Florida now have 12 foot ceilings in the great room and kitchen with many vaulted to 16 feet. This is especially true when there are views to water and they are using 10 foot glass doors to take advantage of the views.

Not most. My new build is in FL and my ceilings are 10' in the public rooms.

I would suggest you post your full floor plan because from what I can see, it might have some other issues.

PPF, rotating the kitchen would be a great fix except that it will become the walkway from the bedrooms and garage to the family room. I'd almost suggest moving the kitchen to the pantry and the pantry to the wall that backs up to the bedroom bath, but then there'd be a large dance floor in the middle. I guess that wouldn't be so bad, as the dining room is currently a bit TOO close to the kitchen.

Without the answers to my basic questions I can not help you. Good luck with your build.

Re the refrigerator: Ideally it would be in a different spot. However, in this spot imagine someone getting something out of the vegetable drawer and someone needing to pass (probably with a backpack). You would need 4'-6" or so depending on the size of the refrigerator door.

They were answer shopping and didn’t expect anything real.

Things are so much easier to change on paper. Living that house in real life ain’t gonna be pleasant.

Thanks Summit. We have 4 feet between the island and the refrigerator so I guess that will be tight. We have seen a lot of single story models in Florida that are designed to take advantage of the outdoor spaces and have an open floor plan and high ceilings similar to what we have, including the hallway from the guest bedrooms located as shown in this plan. We are comfortable with our overall floor plan since we have seen models and been in homes that are similar and they are spectacular in their openness and integrating the year round outdoor Florida living spaces with the open indoor living versus the traditional segmented design approach. We are looking for suggestions on how to best configure the kitchen within this floor plan. Thanks for your comments.

Actually you have a lot less than that if you don't go with a counter depth refrigerator.

A kitchen designer can only work within the limitations that the room has. Magic ain’t gonna happen to suddenly make that be functional and efficient. It will grand central station, poorly lit, poorly ventilated, and cold and unfriendly to occupy. This is a house where everyone retreats to the bedrooms rather than gathering in the public spaces.

You need to start over.

I'm sorry but Sophie is right. You have major traffic coming right through your work zone.

I understand you want light and open to the outdoor spaces. I'm in FL too and I have exactly that but not to the detriment of my kitchen and not so that a work zone becomes a major traffic zone. The one thing everyone comments on when they walk into my house is how light it is, how open it is to the exterior and how well everything flows between spaces both interior and exterior.

It can be done but it needs tweaking to do it right. It's a heck of a lot cheaper to get it right on paper, than to realize after the fact that you made a major mistake. Also what feels right walking through a model, many times doesn't translate into everyday living. Models are designed to make it look appealing and to hide the negatives.

If I were you, I'd really think long and hard about your layout.

You've received a lot of good, helpful advice already, here and at the Kitchen forum.

"most of the new models in Florida now have 12 foot ceilings in the great room and kitchen with many vaulted to 16 feet. This is especially true when there are views to water and they are using 10 foot glass doors to take advantage of the views."

I understand about the views but people have to live inside a house, and in order for that to be done comfortably and pleasantly, you need a reasonable, human scale and proportions. Not something outsize and overscaled. This is already creating problems for you. At the very least with this sort of scale, an architect should plan for the interior problems/challenges that arise. As they have arisen here.

You have two problems. One is the scale and size of the general project, the other is the layout of the kitchen.

If we had a built in coffee machine where would you put it?

First figure out how you use your kitchen, what you want and need in it, and THEN plan your kitchen. Not the other way around. How big is your family? Do you like to cook? Do you cook often or reheat takeout? Do you bbq outside? Do you eat a lot of vegetables and fruit? Do you shop for groceries often or infrequently?

However, you can't consider the kitchen in a vacuum.

"First figure out how you use your kitchen, what you want and need in it, and THEN plan your kitchen."

A novel idea worth repeating.

WSR WSR - if you're still reading this post I have a creative suggestion for the space above the high kitchen cabinets if you want to keep your ceiling height. Since you're custom building you can think outside the soffit, so to speak. Build a soffit that's solid on the kitchen side but let it serve as high storage for out of season items by adding sliding doors for access high up on the wall of the opposite room. From your plan, it looks like you have closet space adjacent on two walls. If you raise the ceiling in the closets too, it could work. You'll need a step ladder to access it, but high storage is a great solution for lightweight bulky items like small suitcases or boxes of holiday decorations. It could also be a great storage place, eventually, for your house plans and related materials that you won't need to access often but will want to store safely. Keep samples of materials you used that you'll want to have on hand for matching later. Eventually you'll redecorate and it's handy to have a sample of things you won't be changing (maybe your flooring or tile) to carry with you when you shop. I always advise keeping a box of samples for the future, complete with manufacturer's information and color names. Enjoy your build!