We have a kitchen with a U shaped with a peninsula that divides the kitchen and the living room/dining room. If the end of the peninsula is against a black wall, how far up the wall do we stop the backsplash? I'm also assuming the backsplash will be stopped at the end of the counter top so it doesn't go into the dining room as well, right?
Hopefully I've given enough details to picture this.
As the rest have said, its purely aesthetic. On this side of the kitchen, we took the backsplash all the way to the underside of the top cabinets to fill in the space. Using different types of tile, we made a pattern that we continued on the opposite wall
On this side of the kitchen that doesn't have upper cabinets, we stopped it at the top marble bar. The beige field tiles make up about 1 foot in height, with another 6 inches (ish) with the detail tile.
You can really do anything you'd like. There are many examples out there of styles and things you can do.
A backsplash is there to be aesthetically pleasing and to provide an easy to clean and durable surface behind food preparation surfaces. It needs to go far up enough to catch the majority of splashes, say a couple of feet up, however past that is all a question of style. Some would say that it should stop at a couple of feet high and extend to the ends of the countertops, however I've seen splashbacks go up most of the way (or all the way) to the ceiling and extend way past the countertops. Partly it depends on what kind of money you want to spend: the more splashback you put in the more it will cost.
