Well, it's walnut, but take a look at what vsalz did with ikea with more traditional doors similar to the detailing on those.

Here is a link that might be useful: walnut ikea kitchen

Also, brickmanhouse's white kitchen, all done with stock ikea doors and considerable ingenuity:

Here is a link that might be useful: 1840's farmhouse kitchen

Wow, those are some stunning Ikea kitchens!

There are so many expensive decor elements in that kitchen that the % of savings by buying just the boxes at Ikea won't really save you that much. That's easily a 50K kitchen.

Green -- I know! That's one gorgeous kitchen, right???? Of course, I don't have 50K to spend, so I'm looking at all the different ways possible to save. I figure if I save as much as I can on some things like the Ikea cabinets, then I can splurge a bit on other things.

We did Ikea with custom doors. Our look is more transitional but I thought I'd give you a little perspective.

I really love the cabinets but the experience is/was sort of a hassle. Are you installing them? Know that painted custom doors are probably more than stained custom doors. In the end, we probably saved $3k over a Lowe's brand (and $8k over custom built quotes) but honestly, I still think more than once how nice it would've been to have just paid that extra money and have it all done at once.

For example - with Ikea, their light rails are, well, Ikea. So if you have real wood fronts, you'll probably want custom light rails. Ordering that ups your custom cost. We used a custom paint color so that increased our cost pretty significantly. Also, ordering something large like a fridge panel was super expensive to ship, so we're doing those big panels ourselves. Whew, that's a pain to try to match professional finishes. But I'll tell you that adding that fridge panel, a peninsula back panel, and all the end panels added $2k to our final bill (which would have pretty much negated any savings we had from using Ikea). We're having to use a friend who is a fantastic woodworker, so we're still paying someone to do the custom work on the custom work we've had done. There's another cost.

Anyway, just wanted to throw it out there that it's a lot more work to do Ikea/custom and *sometimes* it's not as much of a savings as you would think.

Lovetodream -- thanks for the input. Do you have photos of your kitchen? I'd love to see it!