Five materials, five very different personalities. Most of what leaves our shop is quartzite or large-format porcelain. The two that punish a fabricator who is guessing. Every page below gives you the verified facts hardness, porosity, how it reacts to heat and acid, along with the honest downsides, because knowing what a material can’t do matters more than knowing what it can.
Quartz Countertops
Read the facts →
Quartzite Countertops
Read the facts →
Porcelain Countertops
Read the facts →
Two things worth knowing before you choose
Finish changes a material as much as color does
The same slab in polished and in honed can look like two different materials in the same room. Engineered surfaces offer the widest range, polished, honed, silk, glossy, textured and rough finishes are all manufactured in. Natural stone is more limited: what a slab will take depends on its hardness and structure. Each material page below lists what is actually available.
Natural stone has no standard slab size
Quartz and porcelain come off a press at a fixed size every time. Natural stone does not. A slab starts as a block cut from a quarry face, and the block is whatever the geology allowed the quarry to extract. Length, width and thickness all vary between blocks, and often between slabs from the same block. It is why we template against your actual slabs rather than working from nominal sizes, and why buying the whole job at once matters.
Still not sure?
Come and see them. Photos flatten stone; a slab in person does not look like a slab on a screen. Our Everett showroom carries sample towers from every vendor we work with, and we will walk you through the trade-offs with no pressure and no charge.