You will need to attach the plan.

This is the option we would like to use, but it may not be best to do so.

These are our other two options. One requires we reduce our breakfast nook. The other requires that we reduce our kitchen cabinets. We appreciate your advice.

Aligned with cabinets looks better.

A plan would be helpful. Sometimes a slight change is all that's needed to fix things like this.

I'm sure you have carefully considered ceiling heights, but 10 and 12 feet are rather high.

This is the plan with the reduced breakfast nook at 10’8” width.

I like the ceiling aligned with the cabinets. Are you sure 10"8" isn't enough space for your breakfast nook?

IMO make the whole thing 10' 12' ceilings suck heating and cooling for no purpose the change in ceiling height will also have a huge effect on sound travel . Take the cabinets to the ceiling and if all the ceilings are 10' no issues either .

Is the lowered ceiling necessary? Could you make all ceilings in the area the same height?

You are trying to design the ceiling around the spaces, now try designing the spaces around the ceiling.

(it is best to do them all at the same time)

We...want to create a ceiling drop down between our great room (12ft) and kitchen (10ft).

DTM Interiors

Dropping the height to 10' won't make it warm and cozy, if that's the intent. Just chopped up. Check out existing high-end homes with high ceilings and you'll see that nearly all maintain ceiling heights in major rooms.

Why do you have a 12 foot ceiling height?

worthy makes a great point.  Almost all high end homes in my area keep the same height tall ceilings in the open common areas.  I would recommend keeping it all at 12'.  That's what we have in our current house that we built and we like the openness.

If you are going to do this, and I am staying out of the the discussion of ceiling heights or changes in ceiling height, it has to land on one side of the door or the other, in my opinion, not hanging over the middle of an opening. I would find that very unpleasant from a design standpoint.

And I would think carefully about how I would detail such a change in height, some random drop is going to look like a gigantic soffit.

I would like my kitchen cabinets to go to the ceiling. My cooktop is 36” with 44” designated for a range hood cabinet. The range hood cabinet will look too narrow going up to 12ft, so we decided to drop the ceiling to 10ft.

Here's a high end home where the ceiling drops from 13'-ish great room to perhaps an 11' in the kitchen (i didn't measure the kitchen height). If executed well, it'll look fine.

My build will also have a drop from a 16' ceiling great room to a 12' ceiling kitchen. I fought it at first until I saw similarly arranged homes.

Will any of these options execute well?

I think you need the walls to make it look like a large opening, like patrickaz's example or your first drawing. I would probably drop the header slightly to make it look like a large cased opening rather than have it flush with the lowered ceiling, I would want some sort of formalized transition between the two rooms.

The range hood cabinet will look too narrow going up to 12ft, so we decided to drop the ceiling to 10ft.

Depending on the overall design, the stove exhaust needn't look lonely and forlorn. Indeed, it can become a focus of attention.

There's no reason that the range hood cabinetry has to be the same width as the range hood. Similarly there's no requirement that the cabinetry reach the ceiling.

And if you insist on it reaching the ceiling, an imaginative bulkhead can do the job nicely.

*****

Consult with a qualified kitchen designer before having your draftsperson draw this up. (I sense no architect involvement here.)

I'll post it here instead of the other thread:

The "cluttered" look I was referring to in your other thread is the variation in the face plane of the upper cabinet extensions (e.g. "soffit" from 9' to 10'?) and the shadows created within the little "vestibule" each pinch point has created. It undulates in and out across both "modules" of cabinet areas. Compare yours to the clean and simple lines of examples provided by both @worthy and @patrickaz. Your open, tall, expansive plan seems to warrant a similar simplicity.