Here's mine. They ran the sheet metal under the cabinet and I ordered a vent cover from a place that has lots of different styles and wood. Mine is a Rickenbacker surface mount register, fits right into the sheet metal. I moved it down from the soffit, it was worth every penny.

Here is a link that might be useful:

I can understand what you want and think it would work quite well. They just need to get a bigger router bit, I think. For my vent, they notched the top of the toekick about 1.5 inches and it works well. You cannot see it at all unless you lie on the floor -- something I try not to do. VBG

Ours is the traditional metal vent. My cabinetmaker talked about routing out a wood vent - but would have entailed using baseboard for the toe kick instead of the typical thin plywood - so we passed.

We did not run the sheet metal from the floor to the front of the toe kick - the entire cabinet base acts as the vent - so fars works well. We sealed the underside of the cabinet and calked aroung the base before applying the shoe molding.

Here is a link that might be useful:

Ours are under our island (one on either side):

The grilles are simply black plastic and they screw onto the vent openings. SS colored plastic ones (much like our trash cab opener I'd think) are available at an extra cost, but the black ones come with the kick heaters, and we thought the darker color would fade away more (visually) in that space.

thanks, those pictures are helpful. i was thinking that i wanted holes cut right into the toekick material, but maybe that's not the way to go after all.

still looking for more pics. anyone have one with the holes cut right into a material that matches your cabinets?

What you want is a series of slots routed into the toe kick. Doing that will leave quite a lot of material to restrict the air flow so the routed portion will need to be larger than a metal grill would have been. Also, the duct extender under the cabs made larger to fit the wooden 'grille'.

Here's a blurry photo of my toe kick heater opening and a view of the peninsula where it is located. It is to the left of the trash compactor (which now has a cool figured stainless steel panel) under the stack of plain drawers. My toe kick is a little taller than most and the opening is 1.5 to 2 inches tall. As you can tell, it is invisible unless you're on the floor. Hope this helps!