You need to also post a full floor layout so we can see how the kitchen relates to the other rooms in the house and also to the outdoors.

Thanks for your comments and picture. We have an open concept with the great room, dining, kitchen and foyer all tying together. The dining room and great room walls facing the back of the property are 10' glass sliding doors thus the very tall ceilings. I was thinking of using a large block shaped hood taking a large footprint from the stove top up to the ceiling and making that a focal point. I am not sure what to do from there but was thinking of building out from the hood with a couple of 42" glass front cabinets topped with small glass front cube sized cabs(not sure of sizing) and then finishing to the end of the run with 42" solid doors. Not sure what to do on the fridge wall. The island and the stove top face the great room and are centered on the entertainment wall on the opposing(far) wall of the great room.

It looks as you have main traffic routed through your cooking zone, right through the clean-up/prep aisle, but without a whole house layout, as cpartist mentioned, we can't tell. Also, the aisle between the fridge and island looks a little tight, especially if that's a main traffic aisle.

Based on the current plan, here's a slight improvement, which puts clean-up on the short wall, and gives a helper the option to load or unload the DW, or gather dishes to set the table, without interfering in prep and cooking tasks. But it depends on the traffic patterns.

The fridge/freezer? in the pantry needs some filler between it and the wall, to insure that the door will open fully.

ETA, you could use the concept of compression/expansion in the kitchen (à la Frank Lloyd Wright, et al), and lower the kitchen and DR ceilings for a more intimate, cozy feeling.

I think antiquesilver's kitchen has high ceilings with soaring cabinets on at least one wall--you might do a search for her kitchen, but unfortunately damn-photobucket has blocked most of the old GW pics posted from their site.

Here is a thread with a few pics that have survived, but hers is a very vintage style, which I love. Maybe not what you want, but might give you some ideas.

12' ceilings are a problem. Not good. Running traffic through the work zones is a problem. Not good. The pantry is too small for an island but too big for its needs. Not good.

The fundamental design issues that this space has are not kitchen design issues. They are architectural errors that directly impact the kitchen design, leaving you nothing but poor design choices available.

A new build should not have these issues on paper even in the first draft. And these issues should never make it into the final concept.

When you are custom-building this house, did you also have it custom-designed, involving an architect and a kitchen designer? Because the questions you are asking are more likely to come from someone buying an existing house. How to use a run of cabinets, how to use the pantry, how to configure the pantry, where to put a coffeemaker if you had one? Asking those questions before the design, gets you a house where you don't have to ask those questions. Like, decide if you ARE going to have a coffeemaker, then design the place for it.

Is that supposed to be a grill outside in the summer kitchen counter? If it is, it is too close to the house ... unless you have a very large hood with large exhaust fan designed to go above it .... the covered lanai area will be smokey and covered in grease in a very short time.

This can never be a well designed kitchen. It has too many flaws imposed on it from the home's design. It's an afterthought. And it shows. It needs so much reworking that you might as well start over with that home's quadrant. That alone suggests that the rest of the home needs to be examined for issues as well. The errors probably are not isolated.

Are you working with an architect who designed this for you from scratch? Or was this a self design that you took to a drafter? Or was it an alteration of an existing plan with a drafter?

I think you want specific answers to your questions, so:

Combining questions 3 and 5, I'd have the coffee maker next to the fridge, because I take milk in my morning coffee. For the rest of that countertop, cookie jars. Filled with cookies. It's kind of useless for the kitchen, actually, so I'd use the space next to the refrigerator for dish storage, and the rest for special servers and the far end for a bar.

Question 4: That's where I'd have a small bar sink, not a prep sink. But then, I've never had a prep sink so I can't speak to their need or placement.

Question 6: For that perimeter space between the pantry and the pool door, I'd probably have patioware, the melamine trays and cute napkins and iced tea glasses and beer bottle openers that you carry out to the pool, and for placemats, napkins, and candles for the dining table.

Question 2: looks like a lot of kitchens, but the placement is poor, being a pass-through.

But I'm looking at it from the "I'm moving into this house that someone else built, where does my stuff go?", since HOW I use a kitchen wasn't taken into consideration.

I've done enough moving into existing homes and having to change how I do things. If I were building my own home, I'd build it around how *I* do things, not how a drafter, or even the neighbors, do things.