Is your original color espresso? It is hard to get the espresso shade with using a wood other than cherry or a few others. With maple and like woods they do not always take a dark stain well. I think it likely someone tried to fix a blotchy stain with a dark glaze except they used too much. Doing a glaze over a dark stain on maple and like woods is fairly common in order to get the dark stain to look uniform. The cabinets you put in look like espresso with a heavy handed sable glaze. If it were me and really wanted the original I would try to make a deal for cherry in the color of stain you want. Cherry does darken over time though.

So you are not talking about the faces having two colors, right? You are planning to leave the outsides natural and stain the insides darker? No reason you can't do that, but it may make the insides seem smaller, like a dark cave. But it would look fine, if that's what you want to do. Sorry...no pictures for you. My cabinets are the opposite....stained dark outside and left natural with clear poly inside. Most cabinets are lighter inside than they are outside, for some reason.

Why not take a door to the paint store and have them color match it? They can advise you on the finish that is currently on your cabs as well. Without knowing how your cabinets were originally painted (brush, spray), applying with a brush and "feathering" the edges will most likely give you OK results. Good luck!

I can certainly understand the desire to save money, but I'm not sure this is a great place to do it. If $$ are paramount there are excellent laminate counters that are hard to beat, we've used them several places in our house for exactly that reason. The cost difference between lumber species is trivial on the scale of most GW kitchen remodels, however. If you need 20 ft of counter, for example, the material cost for beech would be about $712 (figure 150 bf plus a 10% overage for waste at $5.40/bf). Walnut here would run $10.40/bf, have probably twice the waste and so would cost ~$1827, a difference of about $1100. Not chump change in my household, but a relatively small portion of the US average kitchen remodel cost last year of $57K, and still probably half the cost of granite. Cost for glue and such to make up the tops will be the same no matter the species. The huge difference come in when it comes time to resurface. My butcher block island, like any that gets used, gets stained from foods, iron pots and other mishaps, rough from water exposure, and occasional cuts (when I'm not looking) such that I need to scrape or re-plane the surface about every five years. If it were stained that would turn into a major hassle, having either to plane down to a completely clean surface or trying to fussy patch stain to make it uniform once more. With an unstained wood surface I can just re-oil and we're good to go.