Lately, we’ve seen a shift away from standard quartz.
Some of it is due to health concerns around silica, and the industry is already innovating with safer, low-silica options.
Yet at the same time, design trends are swinging hard toward natural stone, marble, and quartzite.
In my eDesign department, we are seeing requests for stone slabs that are a whole universe unto themselves. So much pattern. So much movement.
If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, you know my golden rule: Avoid bossy finishes at all costs.
Because your kitchen is likely the most expensive room in your home, you want versatility. You want a “backdrop” that lets you change your decor for decades without redoing the “bones”.
And a busy stone countertop with a lot to say is not that.
Here is why natural stone can make your life—and your renovation—much more complicated:
It’s Bossy
Busy patterns with multiple colors are incredibly hard to coordinate with. Suddenly, your countertop is dictating your cabinet color, your walls, and every piece of furniture in the adjoining room.
Here is a slab that an eDesign client recently fell in love with.
I get it. It’s like an image of a petrified tree fallen in a river. Amazing. It’s more like art.
But as a glued down kitchen countertop in your open concept kitchen?
Now you’re decorating with the violet greys and taupes and the muddy greens forever. The cabinet colour will much too easily be a miss.
And how do you cut this to make it counter depth and turn a corner??
Instead, I would install a fabulous large piece of art in your room that is displayed on eye level and that, more importantly, you can easily swap out in time to change up the colour palette.
This client wanted natural stone so we nudged her towards a soapstone look granite instead.
Interest comes from the combination, the details and, ultimately, the decor. Not a bossy show stopping piece of art on the countertop.
It’s impossible to predict
See how in her image of the slab above there is the glare of artificial light and the stone is stacked vertically? This means the undertone and colour will look dramatically different laid flat in your kitchen.
It’s Russian Roulette. A wild guess.
There is no way to really predict and control for colour and the suppliers won’t even provide samples for testing. Yikes!
Here’s a kitchen I posted about (from Instagram) where the homeowner was confused about what went wrong. You can read the post here.
You could argue that my pushback on a busy, quick-to-date look is subjective and based on my long experience… and that it’s absolutely up to you if you want trendy.
Both are true. Here’s what’s undeniable: it is impossible to predict colour from the stone yard. It’s an objective fact and it goes wrong ALL THE TIME.
Pattern problems
In my Create Your Dream Home training, I teach a wealth of principles that will save you from falling into the most common expensive ditches. Because you don’t know what you don’t know.
The one rule I never break is that when it comes to glued-down hard finishes, only ONE should have a pattern. The rest need to be simple and solid and play a supporting role.
In this trend there is an alarming tendency to want everything to be interesting in its own right.
And this is a huge problem. If you have interesting floor tile and you want multi coloured patterned quartzite countertop it becomes exponentially more complicated.
You’re basically asking for the impossible.
Installation Headaches
Matching up prominent directional veining is an art form. If your installer doesn’t know how to do it well, it can look extremely awkward. This kind of thing happens all the time.
Maintenance and fragility
Finally, marble can be gorgeous, but it stains and etches. Many quartzites are prone to cracking or moisture darkening.
Quartzite is more fragile. It has the potential to crack along all those pretty veins.
And technically most natural stone needs to be sealed every single year.
This countertop was barely installed before it failed — something we see far too often in Facebook groups where frustrated homeowners share similar experiences.
Boring now equals timeless later
If you aren’t a professional designer, the best way to save your sanity (and your budget) is to keep your hard finishes simple. This is not the time to “get creative.”
The finishes that seduce you in the showroom today are the ones that will date your home to a specific five-year window. Stick to quiet patterns and simple whites or creams.
They give you the freedom to express your personality through paint, art, and styling—all of which are much easier to change than a five-thousand-pound slab of “look-at-me” granite.
Need help making sure your finishes actually talk to each other?
My Create Your Dream Home training will give you the framework to choose the right colours for everything in your home—before you make a permanent mistake.
Over to you, my lovelies: Are you crushing on a fancy natural stone? Or are you looking for simple, timeless alternatives?
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Yikes. But just to provide another perspective, I have a dark green granite countertop that has provided 22 years of maintenance-free glory. It is the most beautiful countertop I’ve ever seen. My husband and teenaged son picked it out, and honestly, I think they are geniuses.
I always think about staining and chipping/cracking for the various countertop materials! Is there a list of the most durable and stain resistant?
In all my chemistry labs, there was this beautiful black counter that was super durable. What was it?
That would be soapstone. I’ve had it in my kitchen for almost 20 years and I love it, in part due to the call-back to my old chem labs. It can chip a little on the edges, and it has some softer inclusions that can scratch a little, but that’s just a patina to me. It can’t stain and can’t be damaged by acid, doesn’t show fingerprints at all, and I love its silky feel.
We are remodeling our kitchen right now and have soapstone ordered. I chose it for all the reasons you list here and also remember it from chemistry lab in school. I wanted something classic and easy to maintain, heat-resistant and non-staining. Reassuring to hear that you’ve loved it for 20 years. Thanks!
Couldn’t agree with you more Maria. There’s also the big problem that you alluded to about the ‘cut’. Fabricators want to get the most pieces out of one slab, which often doesn’t work with the part of the slab that you fell in love with. Then there’s that narrow piece in front of the sink which is so prone to fracturing along the vein in real stone.
Preach it, Maria!! 👌🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👌🏻🥰
I love the color combination in the second photo. What are the paint colors? Thanks!
Plain Carrara marble has kept me happy for 13 years. There’s patina, but nothing that ruins its beauty. Don’t know why, but I’ve never had to seal it. Once I spilled iodine, fortunately in an unobtrusive corner, but the stain gradually disappeared and now there’s no trace of it. Oil stains gradually disappear as well. It’s actually pretty easy care, and not what I would call bossy. Maybe it’s the place where I got it, owned by an old Italian man. The fabrication was excellent.
In French bakeries, Carrara marble counters can still be going strong after 100 years.
Soapstone I
I wanted marble countertops my whole life and I chose a grey-and-cream-veined Italian marble on our kitchen island with soapstone-style black granite on the other kitchen counters, with my eyes wide open about all the issues, from maintenance to etching. Nine years later, I remain delighted with our choices and would do it all over again. Those countertops were chosen to harmonize with other elements I had selected first or was committed to keeping (like the custom birch cabinets).
However, a much-on-sale granite countertop that I picked up for one of our bathrooms remains the thing in that room that doesn’t play nicely with everything else. It’s got too much movement and too many colours, and reads muddy in my mostly cool-toned house.
Bossy is right. And lesson learned.
Well Silicosis is a real issue for the fabricators so I think we will need to embrace real stone for the health of our people.
10 years ago we remodeled our kitchen. I used “bossy” for the countertops because they did and still do help “take my breath away” every time I walk into my kitchen!!
I have Cambria Bellingham in my kitchen and on the island.
I have Argento Romano laminate on our bar/desk area.
They are “bossy” but in a neutral way, IMHO.
My cabinets are white. My backsplash is white subway tile with white grout. My floor is white with subtle beige and grey swirls. My appliances are white and stainless. My furniture is white. My walls are beige.
I discovered your blog while I was remodeling. It helped me make the kitchen of my dreams!!!!
I LOVE my kitchen. Still. To this day!!
That gorgeous bossy marble that looks like a petrified tree fallen in a river (aka God’s artwork)? … if we had the money for it… it would be the focal point of our great room – the intact complete slab mounted vertically and securely on hidden wall brackets – highlighted with museum-type lighting, so we could really drink in its beauty. Then, when we’d fully appreciated it and were ready for a change, we would sell it as a full, intact slab to someone else, maybe replacing it with another such piece of art!
As it is, we have incredible outdoor views each season, framed by huge white windows, so that’s our obsession.
My brother and SIL were house hunting and were shown a home where the owners had spent thousands of dollars on a renovating the kitchen. The kids were all excited as they’re big foodies and were thinking “ this is great we won’t have to reno.” …until they saw the phlegm green granite counter with the river of lava flowing through it. We won’t talk about the PINK custom cabinets but the wood floor was nice. My brother told his wife that the cabinets could be repainted and her response was ‘too bad we can’t paint the counter’ my brother actually had a quote to replace then which came in at over 10,000.00 so the deal fell through. The kitchen was a year old!! The house sold for a lot less than asking.
Lesson: if there is any chance you will be selling in less than
5-7 years stick with the safe neutral hard surfaces. Avoid that weird janky fake marble looking quartz with waterfall ends on islands too. Sorry we are condo hunting ( still) and I cannot decide what is more off putting the millennial grey kitchen with the black and white overkill marble and black fixtures or the early 00’s acres of honey oak cabinets with ogee carved doors and dark green granite counters ( probably super $$ when installed twenty years ago.) the former has dated itself in < five years, the latter I can rip out with a clean conscience regardless of what it cost the OG owner. If both owners had gone neutral I wouldn’t be calculating the cost of renovation when I’m already nearing the top of our budget…
Well said thanks for your comment! xo
Some of the problems on your post come from bad craftsmanship. The ill-matching seam happens when sloppy planning meets lazy workers. And never decide on a countertop based on its vertical appearance because countertops like flat, horizontal.
So much of the damage of bad design is self-inflicted. That’s a shame.
Yes, craftsmanship is exactly the point I’m making because the reality is most homeowners don’t know which details matter until after everything is installed and suddenly something feels off or is just plain wrong.
That’s exactly why I teach classic, timeless choices and proper colour relationships instead of encouraging homeowners to install risky hard finishes. Renovations don’t forgive guessing. A seam, a busy countertop, the wrong undertone, a trendy choice that dominates the room . . . once it’s installed, it’s expensive to undo.
Most people aren’t intentionally making bad decisions, they just don’t know what they don’t know yet.