I love Lamps Plus. Lighting Universe, Restoration hardware, Vintage Lighting, West Elm (stop me) are all great. I don't know if it'll work for you, but have you noticed those screw-in things that you put in canned lights to create pendants? If your lighting is in the right place, these might work for you?

What's the wattage of the mosaic mini pendant? I would think using the light that mimics your vent hood would probably look okay if the sink isn't too close to the peninsula, assuming the wattage is high enough of course. The only concern I would have is a pendant over me instead of over the sink area; might not give appropriate light. Is the vent working? If not, could you take it out? Or maybe doing two smaller recessed lights on either side of that vent (depending how big it is across your sink area) would work better; then you would have the light properly over the sink? Hope those thoughts are of some help...

For the uplight, you could go a few routes, especially with respect to dimming functionality. And some fixtures don't support dimming, so you need to figure that out. To that end, I suggest you think through the use cases. For example, the use case that I think I'd appreciate most is late evening, after you've retired to another room of the house, at which time a mellow indirect glow from the skylight cutout would be particularly pleasant. You might also want the more light from this source on occasion, in which case you'd want brighter lights on a dimmer. That being said, here's some options. I'm thinking two, centered on the skylights, mounted near the bottom rim of the cutout (just above the beam probably). Regarding the pendant, I know that selecting pendants is hard enough without more to think about, but one downside of a single pendant vs multiple pendants is thhat single sources create worse shadows. And the clear glass pendants above exacerbate this harsh shadow problem by being point sources, whereas the Fillsta, for example, mitigates this problem because it's effectively a uniform 31" sphere of light. This large diffuser also makes it possible to use a brighter source. For example, you could put a 300W equivalent CFL in the Fillsta, but such a bright light would be unacceptably harsh in a point source like the clear glass pendants above.

I appreciate your response Flo and Sophie. Since we are purchasing a tract home, I'm concerned we won't be able to get the prewires moved unless we have something more than just for aesthetics. For that same reason, we're having to pick our battles by concentrating on getting the pendant lights moved, since it will be more likely than having the vent moved at this stage of the process. With that said, what do you think would be best argument for having the prewires moved? We hope to have a strong case when we come to them with this. Thank you again for your input.