Yeah, Quartz (are they calling it Silestone or something stupid now?) is awesome. I’d go with that over granite in a heartbeat.
I was speaking from the perspective of a new home buyer, I suppose.
Tour a new home with hardwood flooring, granite countertops, travertine tile in the kitchen and/or bath, and all stainless steel applicances and you can be assured the original owner watched a lot of HGTV and splurged on all the status symbol upgrades.
I guess I can give you the tile, I don’t really care so much about that but IMO stainless steel appliances look really good. So that’s why we have them.
I like granite for some purposes. It’s not all that incredibly expensive. I have a granite-and-steel dining room table that I like a lot, just cost a few hundred bucks.
My countertops are some cheap composite, though. I don’t like laminate myself, and if I was buying something new, I would buy something more expensive, though not necessarily granite. The look of granite for a countertop seems a bit odd to me.
I too have read that some rare granite slabs can be radioactive enough to be at least theoretically dangerous. Wouldn’t do any harm to use a geiger counter on the lot before purchasing.
Or in our case (with the exception of travertine), all of the above were standard options in our new home. The upgrades were to better/different looking granite countertops, different hardwoods, and to better stainless steel appliances.
There are a bunch of different brands. Silestone is Cosentino’s quartz countertop, but there is also Zodiaq (Dupont), Cambria, Hahnstone, and Caesarstone. The are all basically the same aside from color (the machines that make them all come from the same company). Silestone and Zodiaq are carried by Home Depot and Lowes, respectively, so prices for those seem to be pretty competitive.
We did a round of staining tests with our Silestone and Zodiaq samples–red wine, coffee, curry sauce, ketchup, balsamic vinegar, all left on the sample for at least 24 hours. Nothing stained–it all wiped off with soap and water. Our granite samples didn’t fare so well; I’m not sure all of them were sealed, though, and some granite is a lot more stain resistant than others. Uba Tuba, for instance, resisted staining about as well as the quartz samples. Unfortunately, it’s totally not the right color for us (we need something light).
That may be true if you got them as an incentive from a builder, but it’s definitely not true if you are doing a renovation on your own house. Granite is considerably more expensive; like I said, a minimum of 4x the price, and if you go with a type in a higher price category it can be as much as 6x.
The two things I see all the time in listing that bug me are “All Stainless Steel Appliances” and “Travertine Tile”.
We’re going with black appliances in our kitchen. I like stainless, too, but black appliances are cheaper, and I think they work just as well in our design. Our appliances really need replacing, though–they are all circa ~1985, and are starting to wear out. We’ve replaced the old KitchenAid dishwasher already, with a new KitchenAid one (hey, the old one was great while it lasted, and it lasted 25 years). Our cooktop has also started to go–it’s a nice old Jenn-Air electric, the kind with the solid plate burners. But the main, large front burner is flaky, and now only works on one setting–high–which is great if you need to boil water but not very useful otherwise. We’re thinking of getting an induction cooktop. Our refrigerator is just sort of falling apart, and is extremely inefficient. The insulation around the doors is failing, and the compressor runs all the time. Our double wall ovens, however, we are keeping. They are also from the 80s, but unlike the other appliances, they are basically in perfect shape and work fine, and the look (simple black glass fronts) won’t clash with the new appliances. It would also cost a mint to replace them. New double wall ovens = not cheap.
I agree with you 100% about travertine, though. I think it’s kind of ugly, honestly. I also hate bathrooms that are done all in travertine tile. It’s relentlessly beige, and we have a strict “no beige” rule for the kitchen redesign. Our current kitchen is all beige. And I’m actually not a big fan of hard (i.e. stone, ceramic) tile in a kitchen at all. I like the look of some stone tile (especially slate), but it’s just too hard for a room where you spend a lot of time standing. We’re currently considering cork and linoleum (the real stuff, made from linseed oil, not vinyl, which is what most people mean when they say “linoleum” these days). Probably cork, since the prices for both are about on par.
Of course they are. They’re also (currently) the only non-super-high-end appliance finish that’s not godawful boring. Everything these days is white/black or stainless in terms of kitchen appliances. There are no colors any longer (probably due to too many bad memories of avocado green refrigerators from 20 years ago), so you’re stuck with one of three neutrals, two of which are visually bland, and one of which has a bit more visual character but is annoyingly ubiquitous these days.
Tour a new home with hardwood flooring, granite countertops, travertine tile in the kitchen and/or bath, and all stainless steel applicances and you can be assured the original owner watched a lot of HGTV and splurged on all the status symbol upgrades.
Probably true, but I’d rather have hardwood/granite/travertine than linoleum and formica (I tend to prefer slate for look over travertine, but it’s pretty impractical too… they make plenty of good looking ceramic tiles still). We just bought a house with no hardwood, ceramic tile in the kitchen, and granite countertops. While I’m not a fan of the particular granite they used (it’s too light and doesn’t provide enough contrast agains the rest of the entirely neutral house), it’s preferable to any of the laminate countertops out there, and it’s price competitive with stuff like Corian or the constructed quartz countertops.
Some of the stuff from the green home site linked up earlier is really nice, but it truly is luxury style with prices 2-3x that of common granite these days.
The look of granite for a countertop seems a bit odd to me.
You know what granite does best? Hides dirt. :) Seriously, your counters always look clean even if they aren’t.
I’m a bit of a slob myself, but honestly I’d be happier to just clean off the counter than to leave a bunch of food waste on it to attract ants…
I may be the weirdo here, from working in industrial kitchens, I love me some stainless steel counters. It doesn’t hide a damn thing.
Obviously I’m not talking about large food chunks. But any kitchen counter that is maintained by an average person has little doo-dads and things hanging around on it (crumbs and what-have-you) - granite hides them really well.
I like them, too, but holy crap are they expensive. Close to $200 per square foot, when I priced them. That’s more than three times the cost of granite, and 13 times the cost of laminate.
Great googlymoogly, well, so much for my dream kitchen.
If you’re pricing granite out at $60/sq. ft., you’re not talking about prefabbed granite.
Yes, custom granite is more expensive than laminate. Around here (SF Bay Area) you can get prefabbed granite at LESS than the price of any quartz and near the same price as laminate. Typically, in the $5-$20 sq.ft. range, uninstalled. It certainly doesn’t fall in the luxury category.
This place for example, came up in google: Cornerstone Home Design, Shop by Brand Name
I’ve looked at stuff like that, actually. DIY Granite is another one that sells online. A couple of things to consider:
Even if you are okay with doing self-installation, those square-footage prices are not all-inclusive (the prices that I quoted earlier were). Unless you have counters that are exactly the length of their prefab pieces, you will need additional cuts, and possibly additional edge finishings. You will also need to pay for cutouts–sink, cooktop, etc.–which can be expensive (as much as $250 each, for a finished cutout). Additionally, prefab pieces tend to be short, which means that you are looking at either doing seamwork on long countertop runs (which we have), or hiring someone to do it for you. The former introduces the risk of screwing up your expensive countertop, and the latter adds to cost. And if you order from a place that isn’t local, you also have to add shipping (which can be a lot). Finally, the slabs at the place you linked are all 2cm thick, rather than the standard 3cm thickness. You can use 2cm stone (it’s a lot cheaper), as long as you use a plywood underlayment, but it’s fragile and harder to install without breakage, and probably not a great choice for a DIY project. So again, add installation costs to the equation. We priced out prefab at several places, and once you add in all the hidden costs and compare apples to apples, it’s not that much cheaper than custom. Cheaper, definitely, but not anywhere near as cheap as laminate.
Prefab can also be a riskier prospect simply because you don’t get to see your slab before you buy it. There can be a lot of variation in the color and pattern of various types of granite, and you may end up with something that doesn’t look like you thought it would. Buying a custom slab from a local fabricator allows you to see your slab before you buy it.
Or, people just like the look of stainless without necessarily caring about impressing the neighbours. I spend two or three hours a day in my kitchen—what it looks like is important to me.
It is possibly misleading to say that stainless appliances aren’t better. Of course, if we’re comparing identical units, the stainless one is no more functional than one in any other finish, but at the same time it’s the case that, across units, higher-quality ones will be more likely to finished in stainless. Houses with stainless appliances will on average have better appliances than houses without. Even if a buyer only cares about functionality, it’s still desirable to see “stainless appliances” in a house ad.
As someone who spends a good deal of thier time consulting people on aesthetically effective finishes for homes, I’d say that granite is a very cost effective finish. You get a lot of bang for your buck with granite. Personally I like soapstone the best, given that it almost has a soft quality to it…but it is also crazy expensive.
In the SF market, most/none of the above were issues. Other markets with lesser volumes (and less Asian importers) may, of course, vary.
Here, slabs come in widths of 30" to 50" and lengths from 80" to 110". We did not have any runs over 110. You go to the warehouse and pick out your EXACT slabs. I wouldn’t trust sight unseen stuff, either.
I wouldn’t even think of DIY for granite. We had licensed fabricators that did it, IIRC, for roughly the price of the granite, including cutouts. Yes, all those prices are for 2 cm stone, requiring plywood.
In the end, the standard “take the mid-level quote” technique for installed pre-fab versus custom came out to be more than double for the custom (admittedly, that is 3 cm stone).
In comparison, quartz came out to be roughly in the middle. You can’t find cheap Chinese importers of synthetic quartz, no profit in it when the rock is just sitting around. We couldn’t find anything (even tile) that came in significantly cheaper than the granite for anywhere near the quality.
I think there must be some regional variation in costs, because here, quartz is slightly more expensive than the lowest priced granites. OTOH, there is nobody in this part of the country that sells granite that cheaply. Believe me–I’ve been looking! Although at this point, I guess it doesn’t matter, since we decided to go with quartz, anyway.
Most of our clients go for granite countertops. Granite in the kitchen, marble in the bathrooms. I’m not a big fan of granite, personally. There are a few types that I like, but on the whole I just don’t like the look.
I like soapstone a lot, and I love a nice wood countertop.