How do I love marble? Let me count the ways...
So I was reading my beloved St. Petersburg Times this morning and came across this little gem in their Homes section.
What turned into he wondering? Lindsay Bierman, executive editor of Cottage Living mag, mounted marble counter tops in his kitchen. Now he's shocked to discover that "everything seems to go away a mark. Even a glass of water." No kidding, Lindsay. That's why maximum designers strongly discourage using marble as a counter floor. Wine, tomato sauce, grape juice and acids will leave lengthy-lasting souvenirs. "Once I got over that, I began to like the patina," he says. Uh-huh. Live and learn.
Judy Stark, the homes and garden editor of the Times didn't speak with this designer, obviously, when she was taking her no-doubt scientific poll to arrive at her conclusion. Most designers indeed.
I can't think of a more beautiful counter surface for a kitchen. Marble, that wonderful metamorphic rock, has been a popular building material for millenia and for some very good reasons. That it's absolutely beautiful is one of them. Marble is a classic, it doesn't go out of style. Marble has a warmth that utterly lacking from granite. Granite may have depth but it's cold. Marble practically asks to be touched. Granite shouts from across the room and marble sits there and whispers sweet nothings. I defy anyone to walk past a honed marble surface and not run his hands over it. Honed marble in particular has a velvety feel that is downright sensuous.
For all the notable matters that marble is, there is one thing that it is not and can not ever be. It can not behave like a bit of plastic. Marble can in no way be pristine in a room where human beings stay. Marble is a stain magnet. A marble counter will tell the arena which you bake pies every Thanksgiving and that you love to use basalmic vinegar when you cook. It will broadcast that your children do their homework to your counters. It will factor out whether or not you're a crimson wine or a white wine drinker. It will age and discolor and take a seat there as a quiet recorder of your family's comings and goings. It will stay robust and resilient and all of these stains and scars and marks and scratches will mixture together into a patina as a way to make it even greater attractive because the years pass by.
In a world in which the whole thing has to be new and clean upd and reduce wrapped and pretend, a marble counter is a bracing slap of fact. Life is a large number and occasionally it is OK to embody the effects of age. It's OK to have crow's toes and snigger traces. Gray hair isn't the stop of the world. A properly-lived existence leaves its results on your face, to your psyche and in case you're fortunate sufficient to have marble in your house, for your counters.
In the kitchen I'm showing here, I specified honed Calacatta marble for the counters. Calacatta is an Italian stone and a honed finish on stone means that there is a matte finish on it instead of a shiny one. Honing makes marble even more stain prone.
Calacatta is a white stone with black, gray and brown veins in it. It is as beautiful going up the wall, as it does here on the backsplash behind this range, as it is horizontally on the counter. Calacatta is more mottled than it's less complicated and more common cousin, Carrera.
The honed end makes it absorb light in place of reflecting it returned onto the room as it does inside the extra normal polished finish. In using a honed end in this counter, it reminds me of fondant frosting on a cake. It has a slight glint to it when you stand up near the way a great cake does.
This counter was fabricated and expertly installed by Custom Marble Works in Tampa (813-620-0475). If you look at the detail photo of that window sill, that's what I mean by expert installation. I can't think of another fabricator who would take the time and care to wrap that window sill the way it's been done here. A stone counter job is only as good as the installation so beware low prices and low bidders. This attention to detail isn't cheap but it is a value beyond price.
This final shot indicates the actual color variety on this stone and it additionally shows how the beneath cabinet lighting 18" above this surface displays. If that have been a cultured floor, the glare from the lights above the counter would have obscured this detail.
So in last, any stone counter is a first rate thing to have in your own home. And this clothier's studied opinion is if you may deal with its quirks, marble is an remarkable fabric.
