I am trying to reconstruct our kitchen after Ian and the demo crew trashed it. Originally, it had a bulkhead with canned lights which the contractor and his designer said were outdated. Unfortunately my acceding to their plan opened up a whole can of worms in terms of areas such as lighting, the ceiling vault (which I can't simply remove because it continues unbroken into two other rooms), and how to deal with the hood. I have tried to draw what I imagine the end result will now be: there is an existing hood vent going into the wall at 97 inches. The ceiling and wall height vary from 96 inches/8 ft.. at the right up to a peak of about 142", or almost 11 ft. before starting to descend.

What I didn't stop to consider during the flood were the ramifications of removing a bulkhead that had lights and provided a certain continuity to the wall, or how exactly the hood I bought (similar to the drawing) will transition either to the wall--will that look stupid?--or to a hole that will have to be made in the ceiling. Either will probably require purchasing a supplemental trim kit, since the hood's installation instructions say it can be installed in ceilings *up to* 9'. Related problems to the first issue with the hood are (2) that I was planning on putting LED flat panel lighting on the top of the cabinets (originally it had fluorescents on top of te bulkheads), but now I am wondering how strange it will look to only have that uplighting on the cabinets to the left of the hood, and (3) one of the reasons the contractor and designer used for letting them remove the bulkhead was that they could provide me with taller cabinets, but I think it would look very strange to transition from one height to another in the middle of a wall, nor would it be any more appealing to raise the height on the perpendicular wall to the left.

Now that my lamentable lack of foresight has made such a mess of things, do you have any suggestions as to the LEAST objectionable solution?.