love the kitchen! You have a ton of natural light.

If you're set on doing floating shelves, I personally would bring the tile up to under the shelves. I probably wouldn't bring it up to the green to the left of the window though, but that wasn't one of your options.

(I currently have two open shelves in my kitchen due to taking out some original cabinets to add a set of double hung windows to get more natural light in there. I'm converting them back to cabinetry when I redo the kitchen next year. They're a dusty nightmare. I have an awesome HVAC system but I still get lots of..stuff.. on them. But mine are functionally taking the place of cabinets - I keep glasses and bowls that we use on them - so you may just be using the shelves to display other items. Just putting it out there that they're dust magnets.)

Also, totally .not the point of your question, but what pulls have you decided on? Knobs/pulls or just pulls? I'm going with a similar style of inset cabinetry.

Thank you so much. It’s been a whirlwind. We do like the natural light and that’s what we tried to maintain.

Doing pulls all around because I really wanted to be more modern. Actually inset was not my choice, but I lost a battle with our carpenter. I won’t bore you with the details.

The floating shelves are not going to be very wide, and will be more decorative - cook books, etc. They were basically the solution for the unplanned beam above. We didn’t want there to be a cabinet underneath, although now in hindsight…that probably would have been he better functional and aesthetic option! Live and learn, very expensively.

Back to the backsplash, no pun intended! my original thought was to just go up to the floating shelves and NOt on the left, as you suggested. But the tile guy thought that with line of sight, it was better to complete it around. That made sense to me, but again, my initial thought was same as yours. Below is a picture of the full wall. Technically the tile would wrap full around to the window all the way on the left as well. Would your recommendation be the same knowing that?And do you currently have 2 or 3 shelves and what’s the space between each? I on;y think we can realistically do 2, but it seems sort of funny to me…

I love floating shelves, but why not have your carpenter make an open cabinet with shelves to provide a bit of continuity (and help camouflage the beam issue)? I just worry that it will look choppy to have the stainless steel hood, white cabinet, and (presumably?) wood tone of the floating shelves all together in that one small portion of the kitchen.

skip the shelves skip the green areas of tiling. Stick with the yellow and place more like a ledge between cooking surface and hood.....say 6 to 9 inches deep....between 30 and 36 in wide. You will use it there for the cooking items/ its away from windows for less degradation effects....and with yellow tile and reposition of a ledge you draw less unwanted attention to the beam above. the awkward placement of the blue lines is a distraction and adds to the unnecessary visual of focus drawn to the beam. You'd get great use from a ledge right where it needs to be. I'm picturing it already.