Kitchen ideas

After renovating the kitchen in our current house a year and a half ago, I decided that I don't want to live through another!  It ended up being 6 months of washing dishes and getting water from the basement laundry tub, cooking in the microwave, BBQ, or toaster oven, and giving up our dining room to a temporary kitchen (with the big old fridge in one corner).  It happened in the summer and fall so it wasn't all that bad, but I still would like to have a kitchen in place before we move in to The Bennett house.
We used a custom kitchen company for our last kitchen and although it turned out really nice in the end, it was expensive.  I have decided to price out a few companies for this new kitchen and this time I come armed with scaled floor plans, a good idea of the design and style I'm after, and (most importantly!) experience.  We do have the benefit this time around of having an absolutely massive space to work with and it still has no drywall so we can do almost anything to it.  For this reason I'm considering an Ikea kitchen as one of our options.  At the Interior Design Show the Ikea booth was amazing!  I love all the organizational stuff Ikea has for the drawers and cabinets as well.  I'm just a real Ikea fan in general --especially if it's been fancied up with custom touches and other non-Ikea stuff.

I am talking to Appliance Haus as well.  My friend used them for their kitchen and it looks great.  Their cabinets also come with all kinds of neat organizational stuff that I just love.  That is one thing I really missed by using the custom company we went with last time --just bare bones drawers and cupboards unless we wanted to pay through the nose for organizational inserts as an additional option.  Appliance Haus has two lines of kitchens that they work with now.  One is Nolte Kitchens which is kind of like a step up from Ikea.  They have fixed sizes of cabinets but with a much bigger range to choose from.  The other is Leicht Kitchens which is fully custom.

I love this kind of stuff.

Some inspirational photos.  This one is designed by Architect Chris Deam.  Love the marble wall and the layout is a big "L" like ours.

This kitchen is by Ciccone Simone.  Love the cantilevered island, the back-painted glass backsplash and the lack of upper cabinets.

Love this kitchen by Steininger Designers.  White, grey and wood --that's what I'm after.

Grey, white and marble.  I have a love/hate relationship with marble though --just like so many others.   Love the look, hate the etching and staining.  In a more traditional or bistro-style kitchen you could get away with marble and just "let it go" but not so much in a sleek modern kitchen.  Sigh**