Listen while I opine some more about counters.

I love granite as a counter top fabric. It has a liveliness and a intensity to it that other substances can not come near. How cool is it to bring something into your house that turned into once part of the seething cauldron under our ft? It's neat stuff all right, and when it first started to seem in American houses about twenty years in the past it was a luxurious object. Now it is everywhere and using it in a kitchen renovation is almost a widespread. As it's stuck on and become greater popular it's also come to be less expensive. No one's giving it away, that is for positive. But long gone are the days while it cost as lots as a vehicle to have put in your home.

As it's far with maximum matters, granite is beginning to suffer from its very own recognition. The fact of its close to omnipresence has certain segments of the marketplace seeking out some thing else. Don't get me wrong, you can't pass wrong with having granite counters. But having said that, my mind does wonder on occasion to what else is offered.

I noted Quartz tops in my last submit and I want to take a look at a couple of different new materials which are starting to expose up. As with most new stuff, these new materials are making a few inroads within the excessive give up. And just as it does with just about every other factor of existence in a customer culture, what the excessive quit goes for these days is what the masses move for tomorrow.

I often refer to Quartz as a variation on terrazzo. Well, there's a company called Vetrazzo and they are onto something. Vetrazzo is a Richmond, CA based company that makes actual terrazzo for use as counter tops, and they make it out of recycled glass. It's really pretty stuff in the right setting. The pattern above and to the left is Indochine Amythest and it is made from discarded glass and fine grade cement. It's shiny, hard, scratch-resistant and all of the other things you'd expect a counter to be. Yet because of its glass content, it has a depth that quartz tops can't touch. To the right is a pattern called Green Vetrazzo. I'll give you a quarter if you can guess its primary ingredient.

Also interesting and incredibly expensive is a product from France called Pyrolave . Pyrolave the counter material is made from a very dense volcanic rock from the Auvergne region in France. Pyrolave quarries this volcanic rock in the same way that one would quarry granite or marble. Then they do something completely different --they glaze it the way one would glaze pottery. Pyrolave is available in many colors, in both glassy and matte finishes. These counters are templated on site, fabricated in France and then installed by team of crack tradespeople flown in just for you. I can't imagine how much all of that costs by the time it's all said and done, but what's notable here is their method. Glazed stone is a material unlike anything I've ever seen. I touched a Pyrolave counter at a trade show last year and I was really blown away by it. It feels for all the world like a single piece of ceramic. Absolutely amazing stuff, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if some enterprising Yankee came up with a way to do a similar process to a more prosaic material.

So what does all of this imply? Well, it method that there is a world of innovation accessible and someday quickly, those improvements will trickle down thru the market. Just in time for human beings like me to rediscover Formica. Hah!

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