It all started with the orchid room that we kept and the kitchen that we added, but as it turned out it was always about the countertop sitting out there in a warehouse waiting to be asked to join the dance.
It was the typical nonlinear color and material dance we do with every project that starts out as a whirling collection of ideas, images and intentions that, one by one, drift away until you are left with a rough assembly of rich colors and materials that may or may not get along, usually the latter, leaving us to sort out which one is going to lead the dance and which ones will follow. We anticipated wood, not stone.
The existing orchid room was pretty much totally finished in Douglas fir except for the midnight rubber floor; the windows, walls, ceiling, and trim were all fir. The plan was to remove one of the orchid room walls and attach a new kitchen to it to make one flowing space, so of course the windows, walls, ceiling, and trim of the kitchen would also be fir and everything else would follow. Then the music changed.
We were cruising countertop websites for something fairly neutral in color and pattern that would play well with the fir when we saw the Slab. It was quartzite and a riot of color and pattern, a tango not a waltz, and it was born to lead and it was called Blue Roma! It was a 3cm
Slice of outrageous stone and it took the reins.
Let’s talk a little about solid countertop materials. There are basically two options for solid surface materials, naturally quarried stone and manufactured slabs such as quartz. They are both priced on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being the least expensive and 10 being the most. They are quarried or manufactured in about 6’x10’ slabs with stone typically sold by the slab and some manufactured surfaces sold by the square foot, so it can be wise to do a layout of your counters with slab sizes in mind. These slabs are stored in huge warehouses with row after row of them standing up on wood frames so that you can view the entire surface, and they are jockeyed around by overhead cranes with large rubber clamps moving them from row to row. They are enormous well lit galleries of stone!
After seeing our slab on line it was off to the warehouse to view it in person to verify the colors and patterns we were smitten with. The slab we had seen was already sold but they still had the very next slice in the stone that had all of the greens, blues and dark rust veining we were after. We held up the Douglas fir, tile, and hardware samples destined for our house and the magic began!