I love this last idea. And thanks for the photos since I have been thinking of getting rid of the too high / too small cabinet over my cooktop but wasn’t sure how the interrupted surrounding cabinets would look.

Could you do something like this to give the illusion that the cabinets go to the ceiling... and tile your under-hood similarly?

I would do it like your last photo. Tile only under the hood and butt the crown up to the vent.

Tiling up to the ceiling, without cabinets on either side, looks odd to me. It might work with very high ceilings, but with 9 ft ceilings, it calls attention to the fact that you didn't go to the ceiling with the cabinets.

Any chance of changing the order to taller cabinets?

@damiarain - what is the extra piece called? Is that a soffit? With 36" high uppers, we have 16" to the ceiling. Would that be too bulky trying to cover that space?

@chisp - I could check if they could change the order. It could significantly increase costs I would imagine.

I agree though. I think it would look a bit strange tiling all the way up.

I would do it like the white kitchen with the tile running up to the bottom of the hood, I think that is a really clean look.

Since you did 36" uppers you can still go back and order 12" high cabinets top go on top of all those and fill to the ceiling... just a thought

My best guess is that those are 8.5' ceiling in the photo I posted... so if you went with a trimmed out soffit, you could either ...

A) do 16" with your current ordered-cabinets... pretty tall soffit...

B) go up in cabinet size to 42" and have a ~12-13" soffit