I'm always about maximizing storage space, so I say go to the ceiling! I would put closed cabinets at the ceiling height, and then open shelves below to the appropriate height above the countertop. You could use the same cabinet boxes for both the open and closed cabinets, that way you could always add doors in the future, if you went with an off-the-shelf product like Ikea.

I think it would be a unique mix of open and closed storage, and would be very functional for loads of storage options. Just make sure you have a home for a step stool that lets you reach the top shelves!

If I were to put in cabinets I would put the cabinets up to 8' with cove lighting on top of the upper cabinets. We have a kitchen similar to yours and were able to get away from upper cabinets which makes the space look big.

All the way up but all closed cabinets. Open cabinets gather dust and grease from cooking. If you want an open feeling, install doors with glass fronts.

I also have 11 foot ceilings; my kitchen cabinets go up to 9 feet. The look feels nicely vintage and would go with your cottage feel, and yet you still get a lot of cabinet space. I would advise against running them all the way up to the ceiling, though; even my top shelves are hard to get to and storage I use only for things I rarely need. I also think it would ultimately feel too heavy.

The owners before me stored lots of knick-knacks decoratively atop the cabinets, so you can do that, but I prefer to just make sure they get dusted every once in a (great) while.

I think two levels of upper cabinets would look great. (Like this: http://pinterest.com/pin/175781191676264023/) Instead of wasting space with a soffit, you get tons of space for less-used things.

Also, I'm totally failing at finding where I pinned this right now, but I saw a kitchen where the area above the upper cabinets was a built-in shelf with trim and crown molding painted to match the cabinets so it all looked like one unit... lots of display space and doesn't have the awkward too-small look of cabinets that just end.

I'm in the opposite camp. My kitchen/ great room has a cathedral ceiling that peaks at 16 feet. I chose a horizonalt line and carried it around the whole room -- top of cabinets, top of windows, top of entryway, top of sliding pantry doors. It unified the space and made it feel broad rather than tall. For me, tall cabinetry can feel constricting. It looms.

I would go all the way up if you could. The only issue is that with older homes there is no such thing as a straight line. Bringing the cabinets up that high may be a problem for your contractor. Just make sure he is VERY good with crown molding so any warpage to the ceiling will not be noticeable.

@Coconutzinger, I agree. Too many or too large upper cabinets in a small space make the space look too heavy and the room look smaller. Also, a small room with a tall ceiling has a volumn ratio that can look like a closet if the owner isn't careful. I do have a friend with even taller ceilings who installed a librarians ladder and intalled book shelves above the closed cabinets below. It looked pretty cool.

8 or 9 feet at the most. You would definitely need more than a step stool to reach the top and it would probably look a tad tacky. The cost would be astronomical.

We have 10 ft ceilings in our kitchen and 12 ft in the rest of the house. It would be ridiculous to have cabinets all the way to an 11 ft ceiling. They would be virtually inaccessible and look odd, IMO. Unless you need the storage, I'd hang them 8 or 9 ft with molding around the tops and leave the rest open. We love ours that way.

I side with Melin. I believe that in a kitchen with 11 ft ceilings cabinets all the way to the ceiling will not be practical and I think they would visually overwhelm the room.

Just say NO to soffits!

I would take the cabinets up to 9 feet and leave the tops open or go all the way up.

I love the look of a double cabinet - a standard 36" or 42" cabinet plus a shorter (half-size?) cabinet on top with glass doors on the upper cabinet. It keeps things light and the uppers are perfect for displaying things you don't use all the time. (I also really like white painted cabinets in a Victorian.) And I just generally prefer cabinets that go all the way to the ceiling (or at least to a soffit). Otherwise, that space on top is so hard to keep clean and just ends up a greasy, dusty mess.

http://www.houzz.com/photos/8569/Anne-Forell-Architecture-traditional-kitchen-san-francisco
http://www.homerenosource.com/gallery/kitchen%20/cc50-antique-glaze-delicatus-white-granite.html
http://www.cococozy.com/2008_11_01_archive.html
http://www.atticmag.com/2008/11/great-white-kitchen/

If it were me, I'd go as high as possible. With cabinets or even shelves. It could look amazing, and would be great extra storage. Here are some examples:

http://pinterest.com/pin/227502218645879479/

http://pinterest.com/pin/227502218646699198/

http://pinterest.com/pin/227502218646352299/

http://pinterest.com/pin/227502218645882885/

http://pinterest.com/pin/227502218645879473/

http://bellevivir.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html

I agree with the double cabinet group. (Phew I'm glad you guys found some nice images - I lost my post right before lunch and wans't looking forward to finding all the images again).

Depending how the cabinets are done, full height can still look open and spacious.

oops that last link should have gone to this juicy green kitchen!

http://www.coastalliving.com/homes/decorating/our-favorite-modern-interiors-00400000034041/page20.html

This one is good too, especially for a Victorian.

http://pinterest.com/pin/227502218646747469/

Ceiling height cabinets look more in keeping with a Victorian-era house to me. I live in a house built in the 1880s and my husband talked me out of having ours built to the ceiling. They look off to me. Other house interiors I've seen in our neighborhood which still have the original butlers pantry have to the ceiling cabinets amd it's a look I prefer. It's tidier. Otherwise all that empy space above the cabinets just looks sort of ... empty

The point about the highest cabinets being hard to reach is true unless you have a ladder like this: http://pinterest.com/pin/75364993734515185/ (We don't.) Our ceilings are 11.5 and our cabinets go up to 10 feet. The very top shelves store infrequently used items.

Some other pictures of ceiling-height cabinets:

http://pinterest.com/pin/227502218646747469/

http://pinterest.com/pin/75364993734505899/

I'm in favor of all the way up but make the cabinets in a light colored wood so it doesn't "loom". Also consider taping out the shorter cabinets on the blank wall to get an idea of what that would look like.

Whatever you do don't put a bunch of ivy on top of the cabinets.

Build it up all the way if you want, but realize how impractical that is for items you need to use. I keep everything for cooking within arm's reach.

Upper cabinets in a kitchen with high ceilings such as yours simply do not look good. Going all the way up to the ceiling is impractical to boot. Personally, I would tile the wall, and have 2 or 3 levels of open shelving; much more attractive. For storage, I would build built-in cupboards into the walls, but no upper cabinets.

Here are same examples for inspiration:

http://remodelista.com/posts/steal-this-look-made-kitchen-in-new-york

http://remodelista.com/posts/design-sleuth-glazed-hand-cut-moroccan-tiles

http://www.emeryetcie.com/en/what/tiles/zelliges/examples/02.htm

http://www.marthastewart.com/854371/home-tour-family-oriented-brownstone-brooklyn/@center/276999/home-tours

What a great space! What @CoconutZinger said. No soffits, just space. I had cabinets up to 9 feet in my last place, and it was great! But I barely ever got the stuff out of those top cabinets (although I appreciated HAVING the stuff). I think another 2 feet of cabinet space would just be pointless and would make the room feel like it's going to topple in on itself.

I live in a loft with 11 foot ceilings and I am making everything 8' tall - doorways, kitchen cabinets, closets. It looks much cleaner visually. You do need to watch that the upper closets don't overweight the bottom ones (look top heavy), so I would pick colors and a design that prevents that. If you have any type of drop lights, bring them down to 8' too and you won't have to worry about the space above the cabinets as much.

But mine is not a Victorian, so I don't have any historical references, e.g., butler's closets, to think about.

Most people telling you to go all the way to the ceiling are living with 8 foot ceilings, 9 at the most. I've lived in old buildings with 9 to 9 1/2 foot ceilings. Up to the ceiling with 9 is great; for 9 1/2, I might go all the way up, but I'd put some thick crown molding at the top. That height gives you a shelf or two, depending on your height, that is difficult to reach, and just possible to get stuff down from with a sturdy stepladder with a higher handle thingy to hang onto higher than the top step. 11 would be dangerous to put anything at all heavy in, a pain to use, and would make it feel like you were living in a tunnel. Stop the cabinets around 8 or 9. I had regular tall height cabinets in my last kitchen, wtih a foot or so of empty space above, where I put decorative stuff. Regular height (not tall) uppers here in a narrower kitchen. The cabinets were and are fine, I wouldn't have wanted them higher. I don't like lowered ceilings or soffits. But I once saw a picture of something that lowered the look of the ceiling that I thought would look good in my last more square kitchen - a sort of wooden lattice hanging down over the center of the room. It would have to be easy to dust and clean occasionally, and possibly impractical for that reason, and maybe a fire hazard (I'd check that out), but it visually lowered the ceiling, making the room cosier. I've also seen narrow galley kitchens done with a barrel vault ceiling (suggested by friend's architect when she renovated) - a curve in the ceiling, with the highest part in the center and the lower parts of the curve above the cabinets - looked great, and also made the room cosier by rounding down those far off high right angles where ceiling meets the wall. More practical than the lattice, as it didn't need cleaning. Look for some pics of ceilings like that - you might like it for your place.

http://ariannabelle.com/blog/2011/12/a-ladder-in-the-kitchen.html

Tequila Red... you read my mind!!! I think the kitchens in the last link Tequila posted are brilliant, especially photo 5!!! I think I drooled some when I saw that kitchen! I do REALLY like the idea of the ladder and cabinets to the ceilings, but I can see the practicality of maybe doing a mix of to-the-ceiling-cabinets and 8ft cabinets like other posters have suggested. Maybe choosing only one wall to have the cabinets to the ceiling, making it a feature wall, and then the other walls you could have any upper cabinets at the 8ft mark, even choosing to have one wall have no upper cabinets at all (like the wall with the sink?). A sketch of the layout of the kitchen might help out even more!

I used to live in an apartment that had 11 foot ceilings. It was in an old brownstone building. In the kitchen we had glass front cabinets that went all the way to the ceiling. I loved the look of the cabinets, but the glass was all original to the house and era. I would suggest going all the way to the ceilings, but to avoid from keeping it dark, use glass fronted cabinets.

Since you've got a chimney that extends all the way up, do some cabs to the ceiling and then some not as high...who says you can't do both. No one ever hated a kitchen because they had too much storage.

At Easter I was in a house with 11-foot ceilings and the cabinets DID go all the way up. All I could think about was, "what on Earth do they put in those cabinets?" The answer was...not much or nothing. It just looked very weird. The kitchen was also very poorly organized and I wondered if the excessive cabinetry encouraged excessive "stuff," since they clearly had a ton of storage, but most everything was shoved into the arms-length cupboards and shelving.

http://pinterest.com/pin/59180182573562052/
This picture might help -- kitchen which looks as if it has 11 foot ceilings with ceiling height cabinets.

We live in a Victorian built in 1885 and have 10 foot ceilings in our house. Our kitchen cabinets top out at eight feet. We have clerestory windows above the cabinets to let in light but maximize the amount of cabinets we can have on the walls.

Paint the ceiling a dark color to lower it visually. Paint the upper cabinets the same color, or a slightly lighter shade. This will make the ceiling look larger, and thus the room will look larger.

I have 11' ceilings (I think -- it could be 10'6" or 12"), and my kitchen cabinets top off around 8". I agree it looks weird. It might be useful if I were dying to display fake greenery, chicken statues, and decorative plates, but I'm not. I'd love to finish it off with cabinets up there, ideally painted white to recede into the walls/ceiling a little -- my current cabinets are wood.

It's not going to be useful for everyday storage, but it could be really helpful for things you use less frequently. Right now I have a jumbo pack of paper towels up there, and I can definitely see myself storing things like an ice cream maker, crock pot, or dutch oven, depending on the season. I'm on the taller side, so it should all be accessible with just a folding stepstool, which slides into the crevice between the fridge and the wall.

I've had a kitchen with 11-foot ceilings; cabinets went up to about 8 feet with empty space above. I ended up storing bulky things like roasting pans and cookbooks up there, and I wished the cabinets had gone up at least one more level. However, unless you have a ton of stuff or a tiny room, you're not going to need that much storage. You're also not going to be able to see knick-knacks displayed 8 feet off the ground, so that idea is out. Here's what I would want: Run the cabinets up as high as you will want to be reaching for things, whether that means with or without a step stool. Leave empty space abouve BUT add a purely ornamental cornice above each section of cabinetry. The cornices could be pointed or arched. This gives your room a "skyline," and a natural stopping point as the eye travels upward. You could probably still use the space behind the cornices as hidden storage for rarely used things like the pot you boil lobsters in.