That will look great! Having your wall cabinets on the lowest part of the ceiling will make your kitchen look bigger due to the smaller bulkheads, and having a well pronounced island bench with feature island range-hood/pendulum lights will ensure as much attention as possible is kept off the raked ceiling.

Actually, @annb1997, think we will go with white mosaic tiles!! The more we thought about it and the more opinions I sought the more it seemed sensible to run the splashback up to the shelf height ie the range hood height. That then became prohibitive for stone, glass or stainless - the tiles are a quarter of the price of taking stone to 300 mm, so 600 mm would have meant crazy $$. Also, we had issues with the thickness of the stone - initially we were told it had to be 20 mm thick, which was impossible with our 14 mm window architraves, but were then advised the stone could be ground back to 12 mm - but then you're paying for something you're not using and paying again to remove it!! Will post a photo with the mosaics in place. What a journey this has been! Moral of the story: quiz your architect about potential issues when asking for a U-shaped corner kitchen ...

conduit can sometimes be recessed into a brick wall and rendered over if you need an extra powerpoint or hidden inside wall cabinets for a built in rangehood but the other prob with range hoods is that they make so much noise and i'm not aware of any that completely removes cooking smells but i agree, unless there's some regulation that demands a rangehood, it's probably easier to clean the wall. The colour of the tiles is such a personal choice but for your kitchen i prefer the same white subway tiles for the splashback and the column as i think that the dark tiles would feel closed in up the side wall but, perhaps the subways could be laid vertically (200mm x 100mm subway?) around the benchtop and horizontally for the column with one vertically tile up the sides of the column and a tile trim around all the raw tile edges...then you have to decide if you like the horizontal tiles laid in a brick or stacked pattern or a quick look at "subway tiled splashback" on HOUZZ revealed these photos...good luck with it!

I believe it is possible to extract the cooking smells, steam etc downwards, so you wouldn't see the fan. You would need to make some enquiries about those. If you have an extraction fan that isn't vented to outside the air is filtered and returned to the room which is almost the same as not having one. You just have to realise that the ceiling will need repainting sooner than otherwise and the ceiling fan and tops of cupboards need degreasing more often. Is one of those extraction fans that come up out of the bench a too expensive option?