QUARTZFORMS: GERMAN QUALITY AT AFFORDABLE GRANITE

Quartzforms has been a presence in the UK kitchen worktops market for a good few years now, but has never really had the impact of Silestone or other major European firms. Even non-manufacturing wholesale brands like Classic Quartz are probably better known among the kitchen-buying public.

Could that be about to change? We sense that it may. Greater design flair / more interest in the materials have started to make Quartzforms products stand out. And a greater interest in working more closely with kitchen worktop manufacturers like ourselves has led to some more competitive pricing via attractive discounting. Over the last year we have done a number of kitchen worktop installations using Quartzforms and we can see that growing.

“German” and “quality” are pretty synonymous in the UK, of course. Car manufacturers like Audi, BMW and Mercedes are symbols – even memes – in themselves of this. Think of the classic Audi ads for the UK market – Vorsprung durch Technik became a catchphrase of eighties Britain and the legacy lives on in the way we see German know-how and engineering excellence.

But well-engineered can still look staid, and well-engineered is almost always expensive. Put those two things together an you can have quality products that sit like a lump in the market. Good stuff – but never sells.

That is what Quartzforms have managed to change. Their quartz worktops are boring no longer, and with just a tad more affordability, they have started to move. In this article we introduce just a few of their latest offerings.

Midnight and Arctic are two worktop quartz materials which are right on trend so far as black and white marble looks are concerned. Both are slightly warmer than pure black or white – just a hint of brown and cream respectively. Midnight has long and quite bold veins, with plenty going on in the background black too. Arctic is pretty much its mirror image – two lovely stones!

It is so good to see some colour coming back into the worktop scene, and Quartzforms are in the forefront of that with their Ocean range. Lagoon has a delicate greenish vein, with a creamy background. A good stone to complement some of the dark green and even teal kitchen units that are around at the moment.

Reef has fine dark red veins with red mottling. A striking material, and one which needs care in context and use. Some of Quartzforms’ own images of bathrooms fitted out with Reef had a definite Psycho vibe – and all the more so if they had only matched the veins up! But a lovely colour – I can see it as a statement island, perhaps teamed with Arctic on the outer worktops.

A superb Quartzforms Lagoon island with sliding cover element seen at the KBB show last March.

The Forest Range from Quartzforms brings earthy green and delicate silver birch tones into your kitchen. These worktops would team well with the rich blues and greens that are in fashion at the moment, but also with wood and natural stone tiled floors. I can see copper/bronze handles and sink/tap furniture working really well with these stones.

Sughero has a warm mottling inspired by the bark of the cork oak. Magnolia is a name associated in British minds with the soft off-white of the well-known flowers – and the ubiquitous paint colour! Quartzforms’ Magnolia is inspired by the rich green leaves of the tree. Garrigue is one name for Mediterranean scrubby forest, whose light-earth tones give character to this lovely stone. Finally, Betulla, as its name suggests, evokes the colour of birch bark .

The Planets Range is at the present time the largest group of Quartzform materials. We have installed several of these – really good marble-look materials which bring something different to the market. The sharply defined, blocky, thin veined-look which we have seen in the recent Silestone Ethereal series comes to the fore here, with Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto all having that kind of veining. Halley goes even further with a very sharply defined and blocky “comet trail” in white and gold on a deep black background. Honey Galaxy and Tempel invert that – light stones with warm veining in the most “block-type” structure we have yet seen.

It’s not all hard, well-defined veins, though. As its name implies, Interstellar Cloud has a much softer, less defined look. Venus and Saturn of the planets-proper are more dominated by their background than by their veining.

Overall, the Planets Range is a superb set of quartz worktop materials. On a number of occasions, customers who were not finding inspiriation in materials from other manufacturers have lit up on seeing these stones.

That’s my takeaway from looking at these materials for this article. Quartzforms is no longer producing boring stones. Throughout these ranges you have materials which are interesting, lively and provocative.  Quartzforms always had quality – but quality cuts no ice if its dull. That problem has gone.

And on price too, there has been movement. Quartzforms want to work with us, and discounts have improved. They have sent us good samples, out of which I have worked up this article! These are good signs for a strengthening relationship ahead.

Whatever 2023 holds, I suspect that Affordable Granite will be fitting more Quartzforms kitchen worktops than in any previous year! Watch this space!

Opposite: Cassie on the Quartzforms stand at the KBB show last March.