okay!!! A lot of these commenters obviously thought what I did - that the cupboards are a deep browney grey!! I think the responses would have been very different if we knew the cupboards were white. If you re-read thru the responses you will see that. Perhaps try re-posting the dilemma with a better pic. One of those original tiles may actually look ok.

Have you considered just using stainless steel sheet. I have done this in three properties. It looks good and is relatively cheap. I have details of a supplier that I have used in each case if you need it.

Now that's a cook's kitchen, are you keeping all appliances along with benchtops. You said that you were keeping the same footprint, if the base cabinets are still in good condition would you keep them as is and just replace the wall cabinets with Bunnings paintable shaker style in a soft grey and paint the walls the same colour, still keeping the oven cabinet in Beech. At the moment your kitchen has a lot of great stainless steel and wonder why the bronze cooper splash back, trend?, I can see by the photo that the kitchen is a bit dark, so perhaps a mirrored splash back would reflect more light and would look great with the stainless benchtop and the soft grey. If you are not keen on the mirror for the splash back and breakfast bar the white tiles could be replaced with French Country white and grey tiles Beech wood looks great with greys and black & white. I would look at replacing the Stools, Kmart have $25 dollar stools, different colours Lighting, an easy cheaper lighting is to use track lighting as you only need to have the one connection, tracks can be joined and placed in any shape or position where light is needed, like over the sink. You can use both spotlight and pendant lighting with these. PLEASE replace any open corner shelves with cabinets. This would be very cheap to achieve, good luck

Great job on the kitchen and I agree with some of the former comments - a glass splash back would look good and the silver seems a good choice. If you decide to go with tiles I would suggest a White Tile with a smattering of Black and Grey markings with the colors prominent not subdued. I wouldn't think Brown but why not experiment with a few different colors and see how they look and in conjunction with other colors until you come up with a match. Only a small area but nice to get it just right first go. Good luck