I recently was looking at Havsta units for part of my basement renovation - so, I saved quite a few examples of different hacks using these IKEA units.

Havstas are built out of wood instead of particle board - which is nice. There are many hacks out there showing how they upgraded their Havsta pieces in order to make them look like they were way more expensive:

This first photo below is just some Havsta components stacked together and placed on the sides of a fireplace in a dining room. Havsta now comes in a tan (with a bit of gray) color - in addition to white and black. The nice thing about Havsta is that the upper cabinet can be one with glass doors - or solid ones (if you don't want anyone to see what's inside). Nothing was "hacked" on the Havsta units below - they are just how they come from IKEA:

Below are white Havsta units - just put in the dining room without doing anything to them:

A couple years later, the homeowner decided to paint them + add a board and attach crown to them:

She also added beadboard wallpaper inside + painted it a light blue:

Here is another set of white Havsta units - just stacked in a dining room. She used all top units to create the wall unit - I assume to make it taller. However, by doing that, she lost the "step back" feature of the units = the bottom units are deeper - so, when you add the top units, they sit back a little bit (which also disguises the "line" that is created between the separate units).

A year or two later, she decided to paint them + make them look like a custom built-in + added a light inside the glass unit +use some wood trim to cover up the line between the upper and lower units in order to make it look like one piece (instead of stacked pieces):

Here is a different use of Havsta units (built a coffee station) - but could be used in a dining room. She also used two upper units stacked on each side + used two lower units in the middle = the little bit of extra depth of the lower units makes it a bit more interesting than if the cabinets were all the same depth all the way across:

Below is another white Havsta built-in that was done by a homeowner. She took the cabinets up to the ceiling + added crown moulding.

She added peel and stick wallpaper to the back of the upper glass units:

Below, the homeowners used Havsta units to create this for their dining room. They made it look built-in + added beadboard wallpaper to the inside of the glass units + extended the upper units to the ceiling and added crown moulding + painted them + used a beautiful piece of quartzite on top of the lower units. FYI - they installed a marble waterjet mosaic tile between the upper glass door units. I think it looks really nice - however, it definitely added some expense to the project - to save money, you could use a pretty wallpaper instead.

Here is one of my favorites (I also really like the one above with the marble mosaic!) - this mom needed some storage for the "school room" she created in her home to home-school her children. She purchased the units because she liked black furniture (although, these were listed as brown - but she said that they actually looked black) + she loved furniture that had a "step back" feature:

One issues is that she obviously hadn't connected the cabinets to each other - you can see a big gap between the cabinet on the right and the middle one (the gap is more obvious between the upper units). She almost painted them - but then came up with a much easier solution.

She purchased a remnant piece of marble (or it might have been a prefab piece) and her husband cut it + honed it.

She also added a chandelier to the room - but the unit looks much better once she added the marble slab. This was so simple - there was no painting/adding crown/making the unit looked built-in (other than it appears that she connected the units in order to make sure there weren't any gaps between them).

You could also change the pulls on the units - or add some fluting to the doors (there are many tutorials about adding fluting to various pieces of IKEA furniture - look for fluted Besta units or Ivar units (I'm sure there are others). Also, many people add rattan inside the door trim or linen fabric that closely matches the color of the cabinets (typically, they paint them).

I just wanted to show you that you can make Havsta units look much more expensive than they are (although, they are more expensive than most of IKEA's furniture because they are made out of solid wood). There are also Hemnes units that you could use - they are wood also (I think the Havsta ones look nicer).

There are also lower units that have sliding doors instead of hinged ones - but it seems like most people must prefer the hinged doors - I didn't specifically look for examples of hacks done with the sliding doors - I'm sure there are some out there. I think the hinged doors look nicer.