QUARTZ & GRANITE WORKTOPS: SOME RECENT SLABS

Beautiful crystals in a slab of Colonial White Granite, received this October

Several recent blogs have looked at technical and commercial questions – especial facing the challenge of Covid-19 in the granite worktops industry. I thought it would be good to have a quick round-up of some recent materials, both very familiar and more exotic, which we have seen in the warehouse. At the end of the day we are a kitchen worktop company specialising in some very special materials, and the best way for us to do our job is just to let the stones do the talking.

I wouldn’t say that we have seen a resurgence in genuine granite worktops – they have never gone away – but some materials have been relatively quiet. It was nice to have to buy in some pretty reasonable slabs of River White recently. The stone no longer has so much of the Farrow & Ball greeny-grey river-streaks that it used to – there is more pink than green now – but it is still a striking material, and the surface finish on these slabs is very good.

White-on-white is an increasingly popular look. White is hugely popular, but very opure whites can be a real pain to live with in practice. The slight element of texture and pattern without giving way to anything strong makes them far more liveable, The Olympus White from Unistone makes a stunning quartz worktop!

Sold to us by Levantina of Basingstoke as Nuvolato Primera granite, I have not been able to find this stunning stone under that name from other suppliers. I believe it is from Northern Italy. Probably a quartzite, in reality. I like it.

While River White Granite worktops have come and gone a bit over the years, Ivory Fantasy Granite (together with Colonial White, top of article) has been a steady seller. Here is the latest batch – material taken into the warehouse this month.

Far more muted, but bang on trend, is Cimstone Cortina. This (like Ivory Fantasy) is a regular stock stone. Subtle, thin veins trace their way across the stone, making it a challenge for neat, vein-matched, installation but really quite stunning on islands and peninsulas.

The only issue with this material at the moment is that it is not flowing into the warehouse as fast as we would like. Cimstone of Turkey has been hit by Covid, and we understand that there have been specvific issues with a work to rul at one of the UK ports as well. See our recent blog on supply issues.

Terra Bianco Satinato is one of those special bespoke stones which keeps recurring in our granite worktop palette. We normally source it from Gerald Culliford of Kingston, the UK’s premier importer of interesting and exotic stones. Terra Bianco Satinato is a quartzite – a natural stone of great hardness, some brittleness and stunning veining – and the satinato refers to the textured, as opposed to polished, surface. Lovely stuff!

Caesarstone’s Oxidian is the latest take on the industrial, grungy look which has been an important and growing trend over the last few years. Rich and dark, it looks like a rusty steel slab – rather along the lines of Cosentino’s Dekton Trillium but without the brittleness and breakability which are the weakness of the Dekton range.

The flip side, so far as we can see, is that Caesarstone Oxidian quartz worktops are a little prone to show fingermarks, and may need a pretty demanding cleaning regime to keep looking its best.

Another very special stone bought in from Culliford’s, Verde Luana Marble has been bought in for vanity tops in a major project undertaken by a regular architectural customer. Marble is not our main thing, but we do work in it in precisely this kind of situation – where it is part of an ongoing relationship with a customer who regularly buys granite and quartz worktops from us.

This kind of wild colour and pattern makes the kind of magic that only a natural stone can give you, and it is always exciting to be installing worktops in such an eye-catching natural stone.