We are remodeling our main floor (kitchen, dining room, front room) into an open design in our main floor in a tri-level home. The main floor has vaulted ceilings.

We currently have a coat closet in the front hallway -- this closet is a drywall closet with walls that go to the ceiling. Right now pre-remodel when you enter the house the closet door is sort of in your face. It forms part of the wall between the rooms as well.

We are working with a designer who has proposed replacing the coat closet with either:

1. a bench with closets
2. a "cabinet" style closet. In this case the closet would have doors and no bench.

In either case (1 or 2), the proposed closet/cabinet will be rotated 90 degrees from where it is now.

The designer recommended having this coat closet/bench/cabinet thing only go up as high as the cabinet itself - i.e. so it will not go up to the vaulted ceiling. So there would be molding at the top as shown at the top, and it will just end there and not go up to the vaulted ceiling.

We are open to this, but it just feels weird and we cannot place why. We've never seen any house with a disconnected cabinet in the middle of the room like this. We have searched on Google/Houzz/Reddit and cannot find any similar examples to compare to. We like the idea of maybe putting some greenery or art up there, but on the other hand it might just be an empty dust trap and feel weird. We're having trouble picturing it and making a decision.

Does anyone know of any examples of a similar design or have any guidance about whether this will work?