The Countertops Are In
With extreme excitement, I am proud to announce that we officially have kitchen countertops! I don’t think I can quite fully explain to you all how long I have been waiting for this day.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is absolutely one of the biggest highlights of this whole renovation for me.
Let's take you back to the beginning.
To set the scene, it's early September (nearly 5 months ago now!!), and we're zipping around all of Connecticut, visiting a handful of local kitchen showrooms in search of the ideal countertop material. As some of you know, our day jobs at times involve selecting stone and countertop material for our projects. Picking out kitchen counters, though, was a totally different animal.
Owen showing off some quartz samples at a kitchen supply showroom.
It is actually somewhat ironic that I have traveled to Italy to review marble countertops for a project but felt totally out over my skis in these showrooms as we set out to design our tiny little kitchen. One might think ‘it can’t be that different,’ but given that marble is out of the question for a kitchen, I was entering new territory. We were now blindly feeling our way through the world of quartz. All that being said, I am so happy with where we ended up.
Where To Start
We got a bit of initial advice from our friends Bryan and Alex of House of Misters. They both work at firms that focus on residential projects and also recently bought their first home. Given their residential experience and the fact that their own kitchen just so happens to have quartz countertops, they were a great resource for helping us figure out where to start our search.
Making Our Final Selection
After reviewing product samples from the likes of Viatera, Cambria, and Ceasarstone, we concluded that the DuPont Zodiaq line was the best choice. We should have known given that this was the product line Bryan and Alex recommended in the first place. The "London Sky" sample was by far the closest match to actual marble in terms of veining, variation, background color, and most importantly visual depth.
One word of caution, however, is that because this is an engineered product as opposed to natural stone, we assumed there wouldn’t be much variation from the sample slab we saw in the showroom and what we would receive. Well, lesson learned. That is not entirely true and we are kicking ourselves for not going to the fabricator and selecting the exact slabs we wanted. Don’t get me wrong - these counters are still very beautiful, but they don’t have quite the same variability in veining and richness in background color and figuring as we were hoping for. Selecting the slabs ourselves likely would have solved this issue.
Nonetheless, we can’t get hung up on these small things and let our architect-crazy selves take over too much. What do you all think? Could you have been able tell the difference if we hadn't told you it wasn't real marble? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
