Lis and I went to Interior Stone in Waltham today to look at countertop materials. We already knew we would like to go with a quartz (a man-made stone-like material that doesn’t stain), so we concentrated on those. This showroom has a good variety of brands — Caesarstone, Zodiaq, Hanstone, and Silestone; the only major brand not represented here is Cambria. We pretty quickly narrowed the field to browns & reddish-browns; here is one of the better Hanstone samples.
In the end the sample we liked best is Giallo Nova from Silestone.
You can see that this particular Silestone color has a pattern that’s both larger and more varied than a lot of other quartz, making its appearance closer to a natural stone. The brown color also picks up the wood tones quite nicely. Here’s a shot of an entire slab of this color.
While at the store, we also took the opportunity to look at some potential tiles for the backsplash behind the range. We wound up liking one well enough to have the store write it down for us.
These are 1 inch travertine tiles, interspersed with pale amber wavy glass and metallic accents. Our thought is to do something like this behind the stove (please ignore my horrible attempt at color matching).
It feels good to have finally visited the stone yard and made some decisions. We meet again with the contractor on Monday, so it seems this project is really starting to move forward!