Your kitchen is a sacred place. It’s where you prepare food. It’s where you spend countless hours in a year discussing important matters with your spouse. It’s where the fun happens. So it’s only natural that, if you want good food and great memories for yourself and your household, you need to make sure you are entirely and totally comfortable in your own kitchen – especially regarding your countertop.
When standing at a counter preparing food, a cursory glance throughout the kitchen will tell you how much your countertop matters – every single accessible surface for cutting and keeping food underneath the cabinets counts as part of the countertop, and that’s a lot of space to look at. Thankfully, there are countless options couples and families can consider when designing their own kitchen and kitchen worktops – the goal is finding the one that best suits you.
Available Worktop Materials
Worktops come in many different materials, although they’re typically either a type of stone, metal, wood/recycled organic matter or laminated plastic. Even among those categories, the viable and available choices vary in the dozens. Here are some of the most popular and quality worktop materials in existence, especially from renowned businesses in the industry like Howdens’ kitchen worktops, available through reliable stone suppliers such as MKW Surfaces:
Quartz
Quartz is typically manmade, almost entirely made from silicon dioxide as per Minerals.net. Because of its manmade nature, it’s typically cheaper – and highly customizable in grain and color. It’s also non-porous unlike many different stone types, and its waterproof nature makes it both resistant to water and very sanitary and healthy to work with.
Granite
If you’re a fan of the spicy and hot cuisine, then granite is perfect for you. Not only does red food contrast beautifully with the black aesthetic of a granite worktop – granite itself is basically rock formed from cooled magma, through slow crystallization below the Earth’s surface as per explained at Geology.com.
Because of that, its colors and composition also weave a tale about where it’s from – there are geographical differences in granite due to the location of the volcanic region from where the stone originated.
It’s resistant to both extreme heat and cold, and is perfect for exposure to any hot pots, pans or cookware.
Marble
There are very few perfectly natural white rocks in the world, and marble is one of them. Marble is also divinely beautiful. Harvested in massive slabs straight from gigantic marble quarries all over the world, some of the most famous of which are still running in Italy as per shown at Gizmodo, marble is a metamorphic rock created through limestone and intense pressure.
Because of its sheer beauty, marble is very common – it’s also fairly affordable. Quality marble is hard to come by, though, which is why sourcing is properly is important.
Whichever stone surface you do decide to purchase, all of the materials above are absolutely phenomenal to work with and, with the right interior design, produce equally beautiful results.