If you have trouble visualizing what you'd like but "know it when you see it", then at this stage you should probably just look at as many stainless / dark cherry kitchens as you can and see which countertops and flooring "grab" you. In my case I knew I wanted simple, natural cherry cabinets and stainless appliances and probably a wood floor, but that was it. Looking at lots of pictures helped me narrow things down, so now I can at least have intelligent conversations with kitchen designers. I'd suggest going over to houzz.com and entering "stainless steel dark cherry kitchen" into their search box and looking through some of the hundreds of results you get. It's a great source of ideas. After you see some you like, you can probably come up with more words to add to the search box to narrow things down. You can also go to google and enter "site:gardenweb.com dark cherry stainless" and you'll find lots of threads on this site too. I don't know of a way to limit it to threads with photos, unfortunately. Laura

I have a light countertop with my wood cabinet, but with your backsplash I think the darker one would look very nice. Sometime the backsplash will get damaged when removing the countertop or the new countertop is a different thickness causing a gap. Be sure to discuss this with your countertop person. You will have more options if you change the backsplash too, but there is no need to if your countertop place can make the present one work.

Without photos of the actual slabs you are considering, we cannot advise you. Those two granites are often named interchangeably, i.e one stoneyard will call it Bianco Antico and that same slab might be called Alaska White at another stoneyard (or White Delicatus or White Spring). Both of those granites can have a lot of mica or not a lot of mica (what you call metallic specs) depending on the slab. From a purely practical viewpoint, while more mica is more beautiful, mica is prone to flaking, and your counter surface--if it has a lot of mica--may feel rough in patches (not visible roughness, just have some rough patches when you run your hand across). This may or may not bother you. Or you may love the sparkle of the mica so much (a lot of people do) that you don't mind those areas of roughness. I would not mind them at all, but we have seen some posts from people complaining that their counters are not 100% smooth.

I prefer the first one. I can tell you from experience that once the slab is horizontal on your countertop and cut up, it won't look quite as busy, but will give just the right amount of visual interest. Plus the first one looks more high end. The second one looks like what goes in every tract home.