Worktops

Worktops are a important part of our kitchen, selecting the proper material for our worktops requires some knowledge of the options available. Worktops can be made of wood, steel, plastic, stone, engineered stone, etc.etc. In this post we will be focusing on stone worktops and try to compare them regarding certain physical and technical aspects.

Marble or Marble based agglomerate stone

• Advantages
• Has a good colour selection
• Easy to repair when dealing with shine or scratches
• Disadvantages
• Stains very easy
• Kitchen cleaning detergents will damage polish and stone

Granite Worktops

• Advantages
• Resistant to heat, a hot pot may not damage the stone, however you should not put hot pots and pans on your granite worktop
• Very common and easy to find, can be a cheap option to your kitchen, depending on the colour
• When you have a big kitchen you may have one piece kitchens, your supplier just has to cut the slab from a granite block that has the right dimension
• Resistant to most of kitchen detergents
• Doesn't stain as easily as marble, although some granites do absorb just as much
• Disadvantages
• Colour availability, not many options and most may not go well with your kitchen design
• Difficult to repair

Quartz Worktops

• Advantages
• Colours and textures available
  
• Resistant to most of kitchen detergents
• Doesn't stain as easily as marble or granite, very low water absorption
• Disadvantages
• Not resistant to heat, may damage the worktop permanently
  
• Difficult to repair
• May get scratched, glass can scratch your quartz worktop, although some friction would be necessary for that to happen, and on darker colours the effect will be more visible;
• May need to divide you kitchen worktops in several pieces, most fabricators have a 300 cm long slab
• Cost, the product itself is very expensive, and the shade variation from several productions will be different, therefore the worktop fabricator will include total price of slab consumed as leftovers may not be incorporated in other worktops. This is common in colours which the fabricator doesn't carry on a regular basis.

StoneItaliana : World Leader in Innovation

This post about StoneItaliana, is part of a series about manufacturers. StoneItaliana in my opinion is the world leader in innovation, and in this industry this is essential to guarantee a long term survival of the product. Stone Italiana has been ahead of it's time in the agglomerate stone industry, it's known to practice high pricing strategy, but it also supplies high quality and innovative products as well.

Stone Italiana has been around since 1979 when it started off with a composite marble plant, in 1988 it initiates a new plant for granite composite slabs. Nevertheless, from the beginning it has been awarded several prizes for innovation, and has always strived in that direction.
It was the first plant to present relief surfaces with the Breton system, it has been the leader in introducing new materials to the industry, for these and much more reasons it's currently the top leading company in innovation.

They have launched continuously incredible products that really bring out the true creativity that the engineered stone can do, they really take it to the limit.
I enjoy particularly looking at the best examples and admiring their capability to get to that point and to continuously feed the market with truly imaginative and innovative products.
 If after all of what I just exposed you still have doubts about StoneItaliana being the most innovative company in the engineered stone business today, if you visited the International Shanghai EXPO 2010, the product used on these exhibition halls was a joint venture between StoneItaliana and another Italian company, they created and patented a product called Cottostone. Which was used on the facade below.