The eyesore

This goes under the heading of "It's Always Something".
I've had one last problem with the renovation, something that has turned into an eyesore yet it wasn't anything I nor the architect or contractor could have foreseen.
In one corner of the kitchen, the one right next to the kitchen sink there was a wooden covering that was designed to hide the metal heating pipe. This is a very common way of heating certain rooms in Pre-War buildings, they're used sometimes instead of radiators which are larger and take up more room. The steam heat runs through the pipe (which I think runs vertically up and down through the building), and the heat that emanates from it warms the room. These pipes can get VERY hot. Woe unto the person who brushes up against one, you can burn yourself...believe me, I know, it's happened to me.
So in my building this pipe gets not just very hot, but EXTREMELY hot. I can't complain about getting enough heat in my building. The problem is that the heat warped and destroyed the wooden box that enclosed it! The box was made of MDF and it simply disintegrated along with the outer paint which got chipped and very ugly.

Here's the box BEFORE it got too unsightly:



Here's the bottom where the paint started chipping and getting warped:



And here's the top of it where it meets the cabinet:



Here's the back of the box, you can see the damage to the MDF:



So now what to do?
We could build another box out of better wood but who's to say the same thing wouldn't happen again?
The other thought I had was to leave the pipe exposed and just paint it the same color gray as the cabinets and just accept it as the heating pipe. The problem with this is that there is naked wall behind the pipe that would need to be tiled AND there's a hole behind the pipe where the marble countertop didn't wrap around perfectly enough. This hole was once concealed by the wooden box.
Here's the pipe exposed:



Here's the naked wall behind it:



And here's the 'hole' left by the countertop:



I've got a messages into my architect Steve and the contractor to get their opinion on the best way to proceed. To be fair, no one could have known that the heating pipe would do this kind of damage and my contractor was willing to tile the box when I first told him about the problem. But things have progressed into a new bad place. Watch this space for how it all turns out...