One of the trends we have noticed recently, mainly over the summer period, has been a renewed interest in solid stone kitchen worktops made from blue materials, or at least, stones with a blue highlight. Whether this is really a long term trend or not, we don’t know, but it has been enough to make for comment here in the office, and for us to think about exactly what is available.
In natural stones, we hold in stock three classic granites that have blue highlights or general tones. Emerald Pearl (shown above, arriving at our workshop) and Blue Pearl are well known, both of them coming from Scandinavia and having been used for years in many prestigious buildings – a walk around the Square Mile will show dozens of banks and office blocks clad in these stones. They are exceptionally hard-wearing, non-porous and hard to chip. Their reasonably high level of pattern (especially Blue Pearl) makes them easy to live with in terms of dust, finger marks and milk and tea stains.
Less well-known is Midnight Blue granite, which is sometimes also known as Blues in the Night or Angola Blue. As the last of those names implies, this is a stone from southern Africa. Its background colour and appearance is very similar to our popular Black Pearl, or perhaps to Verde Ubatuba from Brazil, but set into that black backdrop are frequent small crystals of brilliant blue. These catch the light, especially with good downlighting, and lift the stone from being a very standard black to being really exotic, in an understated way. The picture above is a close up, with the reflection of the camera allowing the blue flecks to be clearly seen.
Each of those three stones are held in stock, selling at our Premium Plus price level. Although that may sound expensive, any stock material comes out economical compared with buying in a similarly priced material on a bespoke basis, just for your installation. We think our price for these stones is competitive and the results and feedback from customers have been excellent.
Other stones that have a similar look might be Volga Blue or Polaris Blue, both of which have a similar background tone to Midnight Blue, but with a far larger crystal and highlight size.
We have also installed many kitchens with Labrador Antique Granite, which does for Brown what Midnight Blue does for Black. A full kitchen installation in this beautiful stone can be seen here.
In quartz, we do not currently stock any specifically blue materials, but we have manufactured worktops using various engineered stones over the years. Three which have cropped up fairly recently are:
Cielo Stelline by Arenastone. This light sparkly blue has a creamy background tone, keeping it warm and summery. It could be ideal in a seaside holiday home, or wherever a light and bright worktop is needed to keep a kitchen feeling airy. Helpfully, Arenastone offer half slabs (lengthwise) so that wastage is often low even on a bespoke installation.
Quarella Living Lapis is a strong, rich blue, with a colour tone somewhere between royal blue and navy. The sparkle element is unusually small but frequent. This kind of colour used to be more common, with most manufacturers making a blue, but many have been discontinued over recent years. If blues really do make a comeback, Quarella may do very well out of Lapis.
Midnight Sapphire is part of the Samsung Radianz Noble range, which we buy in through Gerald Culliford of Kingston. In common with the rest of the Noble quartz stones, there is real design flair here, and the deep grey background is right on trend with current worktops. Within that grey matrix chips of both beige and blue, slightly metallic crystals can be seen. The overall effect is understated, business-like and stunning, while being an extremely liveable-with stone. Love it!
To finish, here is a comparative image of the six stones described.
