Selecting our kitchen island bench top

One of the biggest decisions we had to make for our house was what material to use on our kitchen island bench top. Being a generally very practical person, I had always had my heart set on engineered stone in my dream kitchen mainly because:

a) DH and I love to cook - but hate cleaning up!

b) We tend to be pretty messy cooks

c) My impression was that engineered stone would be the most suitable for us due to above points a) and b) :)

During the design phase of our house renovation, our architect actually specified Carrara marble for our kitchen. My initial reaction was 'are you crazy? isn't marble super expensive?!!!'. However, it seems that this is a common misconception. Yes, marble can be expensive, but so can engineered stone. It all depends on the type - for example, Calacutta marble (the ones with the distinct grey veining features) can be two or three times the price of Carrara. For engineered stone, most manufacturers have a number of ranges which will differ in price depending on the design you choose. In fact, when looking at anything other than the base ranges of engineered stone, they can actually be much more expensive than Carrara marble. I hate to sound like a penny pincher, but given how much this entire project was going to cost, the idea of being able to save some money on the bench tops was the first reason we even started to consider using natural stone.

The second and final reason was that once we went out and properly looked at marble vs engineered stone we just fell in love with the marble. This is of course entirely subjective, but the things I personally love about marble are:

• How every single slab is unique. Given our kitchen island is the feature of our rear extension (it's nearly 4m long!), the aesthetics of the stone were very important to us.

Marble has a softness to it which just can't be replicated by engineered stone.Our kitchen is going to have very simple, plain white cabinetry which can look a bit cold and sterile and I'm hoping the earthiness of the marble will help soften it.

• The character of the stone. Yes, one of the main concerns we had about marble was the fact that it does etch and stain quite easily. However, I read this great post about marble on Rebecca Judd Loves where she talks about seeing marble in places like the Vatican in Rome and in restaurants and bars on their counter tops. The thing with marble is that yes, it does wear over time, but this is part of its charm. We bought a period home over a brand new house because we fell in love with the history and the many imperfections that gave it character and I feel like it will be the same with our marble.

Another great blog that helped me make the decision to go with marble is this one from The Kitchn. Definitely worth checking out if you're asking the same question of marble vs. engineered as it gives a detailed review of how their bench tops are faring one year after installation.

Having weighed up the pros and cons, we ended up compromising on what we knew was the practical decision vs what we loved. As I mentioned, DH and I tend to be messy cooks and we are terrible about maintaining things, so we decided to go with with a plain white engineered stone on our back bench where most of the cooking prep work will be done, next to our stove and also on our splash back, but will have Carrara marble on our kitchen island bench. This will allow our kitchen island to be the real showpiece in this part of the house.

Decision made, I was off to visit many, many stone showrooms to pick our marble slab.

One of the best places to visit stone showrooms if you live in metro Melbourne is down Church St in Richmond. There you'll find the showrooms of big suppliers such as CDK Stone and Signorino etc. Lots of great tile shops that way too but more about that in another post :)

The best thing about being able to visit showrooms closer to home, is you can narrow down your preferred suppliers before making the trek out to their warehouses where you can pick your actual slab. These tend to be located further afield and often have limited opening hours so it's not practical to visit several of them unless you don't work weekdays.

If you're particular about your finishes, it's important to take the time to go out and visit the manufacturers as there you will actually be able to view each of the individual slabs to pick the ones you want. As Carrara is one of the most popular types of marble, there isn't often much stock sitting around so you have to be prepared to go out to view and make a decision pretty quickly. I really wanted one that had cleaner veins with a white background and not many of those tend to come through as most Carrara tends to be quite grey. I had to wait a few months before a block came in that I really loved so make sure you plan well in advance if you know you need to buy marble!

We ended purchasing our slabs of stunning Carrara marble from CDK Stone. I'm so happy with the slab we picked and can't wait to see how it looks in our kitchen!

#renovation #marble #carrara #kitchen #benchtop