See how some quarter round looks. Pick up a length at Lowes and take a look.

that has to be fixed. looks silly

Did he explain why they didn’t scribe it to the ceiling? His “piece of wood” should have been first then the crown which should have been scribed to the ceiling.

Looks to me some where along the line there was a mistake made. It isn't right and will drive you crazy. I don't have experience with this but I think your contractor is offering a cheap band-aid. I would look at adding another piece such as quarter round as deco suggest or some other trim piece. And hopefully, someone will show up here that has knowledge how this happened ( cabinets hung to low, wrong measurements, etc) so that person can pay for the new trim and installation of it other than you.

My only objection is the dark shadow on top around the perimeter of the kitchen. If you could fill the space it would eliminate that.

The crown should be tight to the ceiling. If the vertical starter piece below the crown is not tall enough to allow that, that's the piece that needs to be taller.
This will allow the crown to follow the ceiling, and you will never notice the variation in the reveal on the vert piece since it's a couple inches or more tall.

You have a starter moulding combined with your crown. Why did the installer not push the crown right to the ceiling? That's what the starter moulding is for. The starter allows the crown to float along it to " disguise" that there is a variance in height of the ceiling. See this thread also as we have discussed somewhat the same thing.

Oh no! That would drive me bonkers. On the plus side at least it looks like a pretty consistent gap, hopefully he has enough room on the stater piece to move it up, but that’s a mistake that needs to be fixed & scribed properly.

I've seen this and asked all these questions. Most of the cabinet companies/contractors use prefab parts, and I'm assuming that's what you have. Ceilings are rarely even. They probably attached the crown molding to the cabinet, then installed it. The best way to get the molding tight to the ceiling is to install it after the cabinets are hung. Then the installer would scribe the top part of the molding to the ceiling. You could also do what they suggested, but it needs to be done by a perfectionist. If your ceiling is the same color as the cabinets and they paint the caulking to match, it should look fine, but if they said you wouldn't like it, perhaps they don't have the right products or personnel to guarantee it.

On second thought, the part that is 1" space would not work well with caulking. Ask the cabinet company for another solution. If you google "https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=why+are+cabinets+not+plumb+with+ceiling%3F&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8, you'll find many more thoughts on the subject from the cabinet pros.

If my cabinet guy installed crown molding like this, I would wonder what else was wrong where I couldn't see it. I'm just not understanding how it was left that way.

Absolutely have them fix it.

Thanks for all the suggestions, these are 42" cabinets, and the crown was put on after cabs were hung. He installed it as high as it would go on the carrier molding, ok that's the piece that likely should have been taller, but the max size was ordered from the cabinet maker, hindsight - we should have maybe went on our own with that but then you want it all to match your cabs. The designer's CAD program did have everything coming out to about 7/16" short of the ceiling, but honestly I didn't' think the gap would bother me. But then you see it for real and go, wait it's not right., the shadow it casts is not attractive. Good news is that the contractor is going to fix it by scribing a small molding piece to fit the gap, I"v been told they have a specialist guy to fix it. I've asked to see a sample of this first before committing. I'll post pics when we get through this!

Glad to hear that your contractor is going to make this right for you. I hope the fix is to your satisfaction! Thanks for the update, and I look forward to the final pics!

At last an update to this...contractor was able to scribe a wood piece into the gap, and then caulk and paint it. He used an elastic caulk and we got matching paint from Sherman Williams by bringing in a scrap piece of the cabinet molding (dont' order from your cabinet maker, it was a 2 week lead time and nearly $100 for a quart). Some lessons learned, don't buy the way-too-expensive moldings from the cabinet maker, we went with them due to my fear of thinking an off the shelf molding option would not match exactly to our cabinet wood and color, disproved by our paint matched by SW. Off the shelf would have given us the freedom to get the larger carrier molding that would have supported a to-the-ceiling install of the crown. We are happy with end result, despite the extra drama (and $$). After nearly 4 months our kitchen is done!

Oops sticky note for wet paint left in this photo!

I like the result!

So much better! You must be thrilled.

Looks great.