DECISIONS, DECISIONS – CHOOSING WORKTOPS

Never has the kitchen worktop market offered so many choices. Never has the customer faced such a challenge when choosing their kitchen worktops.

This is for lots of reasons, and its worth thinking them through.

The cleaning chore – keeping those worktops gleaming!

One of Cosentino’s massive Dekton production lines in Southern Spain

One reason for the complications in decision making is the variety of material types. Almost all of us (over forties!) were probably brought up in a home with Laminate – Formica – top. Those days are long gone as so many new products have been developed or introduced.

• The ease and cost of creating bespoke granite worktops has brought our flagship product to the popular market.
• Mixing natural stone and plastic has created quartz (7% plastic) and the whole range of Corian-like high plastic content materials, some of which are effectively thick layers laminated onto boards.

Where there’s muck there’s brass… and where there’s brass there will always be more and more hands reaching out to grab a bit. New companies will spring up to grab market share.

The quartz market especially has seen phenomenal growth and change over the last quarter century. Silestone and Caesarstone may stake rival claims to being first off the blocks with their product, but their voices seem all but lost these days in the race to produce quartz as a generic product. We have now lost count of all the companies in the quartz field, and the same multiplication is now being seen among the ceramics.

Calacatta Portugal from Cosystone – a company that didn’t exist 5 years ago but which has successfully disrupted the whole UK quartz market

Silestone v Classic Quartz in the Calacatta Gold battle

Have you heard of going viral?! It is most obvious in our meme-driven social-media age, but in a way the rush to what is fashionable – and therefore the rush to reproduce it – is far older. The Beatles sound, Habitat or Chanel or Laura Ashley or Cath Kidston design – if it’s popular, it will be copied.

A few years ago Silestone produced their formidably successful Eternal Calacatta Gold. Almost overnight it became THE stone for kitchen worktops in the UK, and it seemed that almost over the next night there were dozens of other versions, all grabbing for a slice of Silestone’s pie. And then, gradually, the popularity of these stones waned.

Currently, the name to conjure with is Taj Mahal. Annabel recently wrote about this – we seem to have acquired about 20 different Taj Mahal options in a very short time.

What you notice is that Calacatta Gold and Taj Mahal are names of actual, natural stones. The naming of real stone is confusing – do not for one minute think that Kashmir White Granite is from Kashmir, or white, or granite! – but when the same names are used for other materials that COPY the natural stone then the ride really gets hair-raising.

Taj Mahal is available as a natural quartzite – but is also now available as a quartz, as a printed-on ceramic, as a full-bodied ceramic, as a printed-on quartz and the rest. And when those variations of material are also available from a bunch of different manufacturers (see above) you can imagine the scope for confusion. We struggle to keep up – and we are soaked in this industry and these materials every single working day. How can the customer make head nor tail?!

The real thing – a Sensa Taj Mahal slab from Cosentino

In the 17 years I have been in this industry there has never been anything like this level of confusing names and similar/identical sounding and looking products. And there is no guarantee that it is going to get any easier – probably the reverse. Our only advice is to talk to people who do know what is what, and please have patience with us when even we are struggling to stay one jump ahead of the advancing tide of options! 

Carrara – another name of a real stone which has become generic in quartz versions

We are Affordable Granite – your best guide in a hopelessly complicated market!