Advice on wall cabinets above the sink and uneven bulkhead

Hi everyone

This is my first time posting but I have lurked for a while and learned a lot from this forum! We have our draft plans for our kitchen and will be getting it all started in the next few weeks. I have a million questions but the most pressing ones for now are these:

1. Our sink is in the bench along the wall (rather than in the island bench opposite - its a galley kitchen design). One of the kitchen designers I went to said you could not put cupboards above the sink as you would bang your head on them when washing up. Is this right? So many kitchen photos I have looked at on the net have cupboards above the sink. He siggested we go with some shallow open shelving instead. I am thinking that above sink cupboards would not be very deep anyway so they wouldn't stick out too much into your headspace. Does anyone have any experience on this, or pics?

2. What is the minimum height between the gas stove and the rangehood? I am wanting one of those concealed undercabinet rangehoods, and I wuold like all the upper cupboards to be in line, rather than the rangehood/cupboard above the stove being a bit higher. If it ends up being quite high this might even take the above sink cupboards out of (above) the headspace anyway.

3. We will have a bulkhead above the wall side of the kitchen, so the bulkhead will run horizontally above the oven tower, the wall cabinets, the above-fridge cupboard and the pantry. I would like this to all be one straight line, BUT there is an aircon above the pantry that we need to keep (can't move it anywhere else) and this will sit on the bulkhead. If we keep the bulkhead the same height as the aircon all the way along its a pretty big bulkhead and will cut into our available cupboard space. Do you think it would look bad to have the bulkhead at a different height where the aircon is, and then to be a shorter bulkhead for the rest of the kitchen? This would allow us to have taller cupboards above the oven/sink/fridge etc

Sorry I will shut up now!
Thanks all!!

1. I dont like standard depth(330mm) overheads above a sink. I feel it incloses the sink to much and taller people can bang there heads. A shallower cabinet is a good option.

2. 600mm but you need to check the height that your rangehood should be installed at.

3. I dont like 2 different heights for bulkheads but would need to see a drawing to give proper comment.

In our last house we had cabinets above the sink, they weren't part of the original kitchen design, the previous owner had added them for some much needed extra storage space. I didn't have a problem with them, but my husband (and chief dishwasher) is much taller than me and he did find it very uncomfortable using the sink - a combination of the sink being a bit low for him but having to kind of lean back to avoid hitting his head on the cabinets. If we had a dishwasher it probably wouldn't have been a problem for occasional use, but for daily dishwashing it wasn't a good setup. Hubby is 'averagely tall' at a little over 6ft.

ETA pic to show the cabinets over the sink:


I can't really answer your other questions, except to say that I would avoid different height bulkheads because it would annoy the (really big) part of me that likes things to match

Thanks so much for your replies.
I thought the height above a gas stove was more like 750 but thanks for the tip to check the actual rangehood - I didn't know that different brands recommended different heights. I was thinking if it was 750 that with a 900 bench that would make the bottom of the cupboards at 1650. Me and hubby are both around 170cm so they wouldn't be that much in our faces. But its great to see pics - it actually does look like it would be a bit headbangy! Perhaps shallower cupboards is the way to go - more 200mm - but then would that look really bad having the deeper ones above the rest of the kitchen and then shallower ones above the sink?

The other idea I had was to have a deeper benchtop, so 700mm rather than 600mm. This way the shallow wall cupboards will not stick out as much relative to the benh. Has anyone done this? Is it hugely expensive? I guess it will up the cost of the stone (not decided yet on caeser or essa etc) ....our kitchen guy said he was going to try and get our island bench and the other benchtop all out of one slab of caserstone to cut costs. This would be with a 600mm wide bench and a 2600x740mm island bench (500 + 240 overhang). If we made the bench 700mm I am thinking we would then need 2 slabs of stone rather than 1.... I'm not sure how wide a standard slab of caeserstone/essastone/qq or whatever is though...anyone know?

Its good to hear others not wanting an uneven bulkhead. I thought maybe I was just being anal about this! Now I feel like its normal!

Am going to try and attach a draft plan - this still has many changes to be made but the basic layout is right.

Actually (sorry) - how do you attach pics?