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Let me know if you ever find one made to better than Barbie's Pretend Kitchen standards. Had many; replaced more than one; lifespan of actual reliable soap delivery about three months. Gasp, wheeze, spatter, won't hold prime for nothin'.
I just keep a small pump bottle of hand soap on the back of the sink, and sometimes get three years or more from the pump. Go figure.
Well, there are three alternative that are guaranteed more reliable than the permanently mounted bottle of liquid soap that you have to refill all the time and breaks pretty soon being made out of the cheapest possible plastic components (but lasts long enough that you can't buy repair parts when it does fail).
1) Bottle of Palmolive on counter next to sink. If it works on dirty dishes it'll work on dirty hands. Dispenser doesn't fail because when the bottle's empty you throw it away.
2) Bar of soap in soap dish. Dispenser doesn't fail as long as your hands can grasp a bar of soap.
3) Pump bottle of liquid hand soap on counter. Dispenser will rarely fail because it only has to last as long as the soap, at which point you throw it away. They do occasionally fail while there's still soap in, but you just unscrew the top and pour the soap into your hand until it's empty at which point you throw it away.
Here's one other advantage to my three options: want the soap over on the other side of the sink, either permanently or temporarily? No sweat, pick it up and put it where you want it. Want not to have any soap on the counter at all for a while (say, you're doing a super super clean and scrub)? No sweat, pick it up and set it on the kitchen table.
So, I conclude the in-counter-mounted soap dispenser is yet another solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Can you say "$$$$$"? I knew that you could.
"Open soffits" were sold as adding airy spaciousness. They've never fooled me as anything but contractor corner-cutting. Too cheap to run cabinets up that extra foot (and yeah, they tend to be junk collectors, so what)? Too cheap to even make then usable display/shelf space (most are open framework on top with no flat surface)? Then put in face walls and stick your beer bottle behind them to get your revenge.
Just for a different perspective:
We have ten foot ceilings in our kitchen. And when we remodeled our kitchen, we raised the upper cabinets another four inches or so. So even with about an 18" open space along the top of the cabinets, and even though I am 5'8" and my husband is 6'0", we have to use a step ladder to reach the stuff that's in the very top shelves of the upper cabinets. Anything higher than that would honestly require a taller ladder rather than a small one or a stool (we use either).
So that's why we kept our dropped cabinets when we remodeled - to have them go all the way to the ceiling would have been basically useless to us. But we could install lights to run along the top and add soft lighting in the kitchen, so that's what we chose instead of even more shelves ten feet off the floor.
I think every kitchen is different and so we should do what fits the total room as well as what's functional. We have to take architectural elements into consideration.
I'm not a fan of the stacked cabinets/cabinets to the ceiling. To me they look like the walls closing in on me. And with 9 foot ceilings, the space is pretty useless because while I'm ok using a step stool, I'm not ok using a ladder to access kitchen items. I have 42 inch cabinets but didn't see the need to go higher than that.
Exactly - architectural details matter. See my post above. I prefer the lighting - it gives more of a sense of space when dealing with very tall ceilings. Now, if I had standard 8 foot ceilings, I might reconsider.
Generally the under mounted dispensers are manual pumps.
I've had pumps. I've also had just regular soap dispensers, like you buy in the store. I don't have a strong preference for either. That being said, I do want things to LOOK nice, which is why when I'm in World Market, I always buy soap in cute dispensers that match my kitchen. And then I put them on a cute Polish pottery tray since I collect Polish pottery.
The thing about the dispensers that are built in that I didn't particularly care for is that I was always having to refill them. Minor, first world problem. I sure wouldn't GET RID of one if it was already built in, but I also wouldn't pay to have one built in.
You can do setback soffits and paint them ceiling light/white to keep the space open without having that unfinished, useless space up there to collect dust and grease.
You can also not put nine-foot ceilings in kitchens and bathrooms, but I guess that's a matter of taste more than anything else.
The OP is remodeling an existing kitchen and I don't think we know what the ceiling heights are.
I did the same thing. The kitchen was already built, large with 10 foot ceilings, which I love. So for that particular kitchen, the dropped cabinets work well. In other kitchens, they may or may not - it just depends on the overall floor plan and ceiling height. It's not an absolute in other words.
JZ - are you custom building the island? The reason I ask is because we did that too. That's where we put the small shelves on one end for the cookbooks. On the other end we put three very deep drawers. One holds all sorts of baking paraphernalia, because the island is a baking sort of station (more on that in a minute), one holds stuff like boxes of Lipton tea bags, peanut butter, that sort of thing. The lowest one is what we use for popcorn stuff - the manual popcorn popper (it's big with a top that has a big turn thingie on it), big jars of popping corn, oil, etc.
Then in the middle we have a very tall, narrow pullout that is for cookie sheets, cutting boards, etc - all that rather large, flat stuff. I love that.
We also added several electrical sockets so we can plug in the mixer, or the crock pot or whatever.
We actually went through several different tops before we settled on the one we have now, which we love. Our counter tops are soapstone (fabulous!) but we wanted some contrast on the island and we wanted it to be IMPERVIOUS as a work station. So we chose quartzite - we thought. It was NOT quartzite, which would have been great, but this stuff etched and stained. NO BUENO. Our contractor was mortified, so she replaced it at no charge with teakwood, which I had reservations about but thought I liked. No, I didn't like it.
I didn't waste either topping. We used the stone (not sure what it is but it's not quartzite) in our outdoor kitchen area and we like it there. We used the teakwood to build some shelves in our breakfast room when we decided we just didn't like it for a work station.
FINALLY we settled on leathered granite in black, and I really really like it. Tough as nails. Ironically, that was what we had almost just done at the very start.
Also, prior to our tearout and remodel, we had two features that I HATED. (Well I hated the whole kitchen but these things I REALLY detested!) - we had a peninsula that cut a very spacious room right in half and served no purpose other than to collect junk, and in the corner of that peninsula to the right of the sink we had a LAZY SUSAN that was OF THE FREAKING DEVIL. Let me tell you something - if anything fell back behind that lazy susan, it was like it fell into a matrix or something - or another whole dimension of the universe. We also had a CORNER CABINET, and there is no place for a pantry, so this was the substitute for a pantry. UGH UGH UGH UGH. Let me tell you something - nothing much will fit well in a corner. It was just STUPID. And because of the peninsula, though there was an island, it had to be tiny and ineffective, and that was also why there was a corner "pantry" - because the tiny weird island made it too crowded to be anything else.
OMG. We ripped out that peninsula, which was the origin of hell, and once we did that, we could move the whole island down, and make it bigger, and then we made a big square cabinet - about 3 feet by 3 feet - with lots of lovely pullouts and drawers and all that good stuff (that's also where we put the spice cabinet I described earlier) and so while it's not a "real" pantry, it has tons of space and may as well be one - well it's the closest we'll ever get to one anyway.
All that to say that if you can avoid corner, triangular doodads, you may want to consider that strongly.
Let me know if you ever find one made to better than Barbie's Pretend Kitchen standards. Had many; replaced more than one; lifespan of actual reliable soap delivery about three months. Gasp, wheeze, spatter, won't hold prime for nothin'.
I just keep a small pump bottle of hand soap on the back of the sink, and sometimes get three years or more from the pump. Go figure.
For me that is clutter.
But I like my Barbie kitchen.
All that to say that if you can avoid corner, triangular doodads, you may want to consider that strongly.
I completely, 100% agree - every corner solution I've seen was at best a mixed blessing.
The problem is that many kitchens are too small give corners either a facing cabinet or blank them off. My current kitchen, due for a resale-sometime-soonish makeover, has one inner corner with two big rotary shelves, and other than sprucing up that layout, I can't think of another way to use the space.
But for any larger space, gawd yes, avoid corner fixtures at all costs. Also over-stove microwaves.
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