CREAM QUARTZ WORKTOPS: CREAM OF THE CROP

With the return of colour to kitchen design, cream quartz worktops have come back into focus.

For a long time we were fabricating kitchen worktops principally in white quartz. Gradually, the speckled and sparkly look gave way to more natural marble looks, and then, with the introduction of Silestone’s game-changing Eternal Calacatta Gold, a streak of warmth started to invade our kitchens. Suddenly, every quartz manufacturer was jumping on the Calacatta Gold bandwagon – in fact one version became our first big-vein stock quartz.

It turns out that those slivers of gold were just the first rays of what is now a full dawn – a new love for warmth, for golds, for creams and for colour in the home.

In a recent blog I looked at a couple of new materials which featured big gobs of colour. One of them, CRL Palermo, fits right into this move towards creams and golds.

Here we see the Calacatta Gold idea moving up a couple of gears, with bold veins dominated by gold, and a slightly warmer (though still basically white) background colour in the slab.

This article aims to look at a few more options which show the trend to cream quartz worktops.

Capri is a superb product, and amazing value at its pricepoint. I never know whether to classify it as a cream quartz – it isn’t as warm as some of the other examples here, but its background colour certainly isn’t white. It has colour! 

The thing that always blows me away with Capri is the perfection of its full-bodied vein. The example in our showroom – with a fancy-edge profile – is just stunningly good! I also love the background mottle – it is miles from the boring “big vein on pure white” top. Capri definitely deserves a place of honour among cream quartz worktops!

You can see a full case study of BQS Capri worktops here.

Unistone Taj Mahal – Another cream quartz worktop from our stock range

Real Taj Mahal is a stunning natural quartzite which comands the very highest prices. It has a great look, with the result that, as the trend to cream worktops has come in, so every quartz manufacturer and his wife have tried to create a good copy.

We stock one of the earlier copies, and one of the best. It isn’t necessarily the closest to the real thing in look, but as a supremely livable-with kitchen worktop, Taj Mahal takes some beating. It is more economical than Capri, and has been chosen by some very high-end clients. Not least, our case study of Ollie and Caitlin Palmer’s kitchen, where the very exclusive Silestone Ethereal Glow is paired with an island in Taj Mahal. It may have a humbler price point, but the Taj Mahal more than holds its own, and with a Hilton du Pont edge profile really becomes the room’s centrepiece.

We stock Unistone Taj Mahal – that doesn’t stop us buying alternatives!

A customer was looking for the Taj Mahal look in quqrtz, but with a textured, velluto-style finish. We sourced this lovely Unistone version.

In the third image here I have tried to show the texture, by taking an oblique shot of the surface.

Cream quartz worktops from Cosystone

Cosy stone needs an entire blog (or newspaper article!) to itself, for the way it has arrived and disrupted the UK quartz worktops market. Erjon, the man in charge, keeps choosing winners – and I think he has hit the bullseye again with his Calacatta Portugal. Strongly, but not overpoweringly creamy, with a great vein structure and good background patterning, we are sure to see a few slabs of this stone fabricated into cream quarzt worktops over the next year or two.

To be honest, there are now so many cream and warm coloured quartz worktops on the market – in general with a natuiral, marble or quartzite look – that I cannot possibly list them all. So I will round off witha  recent adition to the Caesarstone stable – Aterra Blanca – in an installation photo sent us by the manufacturers.