What's behind the area? If you opened the wall up and did a header to support that opening, you could recess the fridge into the stud cavity enough to make it flush on the front. You'd have to plan the electrical outlets carefully, and for sure choose a built in model for the proper clearances, but that would give you the room you need to reuse the granite. And you could reuse the drawer base also by adding wine storage bins on top of it. The plain 6" cubbies would take the counter height to the standard 36". And if you needed the additional width to make a 24" beverage fridge work, you could do the wine cubbies down one side of it as well. The hardest part is opening the wall for the header.

what we did and what I would tweak if doing it again: lower level finished rec area with wet bar.....counter in place and needed a fridge for below.Purchased the Danby small fridge and it does protrude a bit but top is finished nicely-location is off to the side/not particularly visible. Do like the Danby. On thinking thru and with experience: perhaps shift to "sit on counter" wine fridge and use space below for more and better storage. any loss of counter space can be compensated with open shelf or cubby niche type space usage on wall. Have learned that the storing up of pop/juice/snacks is something later one learns is not beneficial and "cuts back on". The wine storage-green light for that... but ON counter units are interesting/compact/hi end/ and serve the purpose. Have since used the fridge for storing excess fridge products when stocking up at grocers..and wine/beer. do look at all the models and sizes for this type of setup. Also-the Danby is fine but the cycling generates some noise[in our location it's not a big deal].Unless you are paying for silent decibels you will add background humming or clicking/etc with normal functioning. Some units will feature "quiet"-but you'll pay for that.

to OP:
if you mean having the fridge so that the door opens into the current doorway - I would say don't do it.

as far as what live_wire says, I see one electrical outlet above the kneehole area, but no vent in the kneehole. is there any vent in the wall behind the bar? I like the idea of stealing a bit of space from inside the wall and recessing the fridge. if that wall is not load bearing, this can be done pretty easily, if it is load bearing, it is a small enough hole that it can be done, but I don't have advice for you because I'm not a structural guru.

To see what is there, gently using a small prybar, removve the base molding in the kneehole under the desk. take a sharp blade, and make a perimeter cut around the edges of the desk kneehole. using a wallboard saw, carefully remove the wall board making sure not to cut too deep to see what is in the wall. if you are lucky, the electrical was dropped from above and there will be nothing there. if you do have to move the electrical over and you do not want to do electrical work, you will need an electrician anyway to put in the fridge outlet, so one call can do both of these tasks.

if you do this, make sure that you screw stops into the floor under the fridge where the fridge feet are, and put a wooden bar across the middle to top of the back of the recess where the back of the fridge will stop, so no one can accidentally push the fridge too far and go thru the wallboard.

This post was edited by detroit_burb on Sun, Feb 10, 13 at 11:17

The problem continues: my stairway to the basement is behind that wall!

What if you pull the granite and lower cabinets forward, and have a small 3"-4" gap running along the back of the counter. Then you could have upper storage cabinets come down to "land" on the granite, concealing the gap.