Columns and Wiring and Shelving, Oh My!

In knocking down half the wall between the kitchen and the living room, we're trying to create a more open, unconfined floor plan. But we recently found out something that throws a little wrench into the idea of an unfettered view between the kitchen and the living room: we have to put some kind of vertical column or pillar from the ceiling to the new island/bar. See where my little red arrow is? Right theerre.

Not for any structural purposes, though—we need to find a way to run electrical wire to the island to power the stove, put in electrical outlets, etc. See, we're on a slab foundation and we can't really run wiring underneath the floor (well, we could, but that would be more cha ching and we don't want to tear up the terrazzo flooring). And since there won't be any walls around the island to run electrical down, enter the column (of doom?). Well, we weren't really jazzed about having some weird, why-is-that-there? column coming down onto the island but, I thought, why don't we try to make it look like it's supposed to be there? I figure we can attach some cool shelving onto the column and use it as a place to display bar glasses or decorative glass. I'm thinking something like this

 Or this

 Hey, it might end up looking pretty cool.