Navigating Your Countertop Choices

Completing the Marriott Marquis in downtown Houston with a waterfall edge on a granite countertop. Aaron provided his millwork and carpentry expertise throughout the entire hotel.

As a cabinet building company, we do a lot with countertops. With so many options out there, how do you choose the right countertop for your needs? Countertop materials provide different layers of protection from water, heat and surface scuffing. It’s important to select the right countertop for the right job. 

We had a job recently redoing a kitchen in the Houston Heights area, and the original builder had used marble for the large center island. The island was heavily used by this family of five. Marble is beautiful but it can scratch and is affected by harsh cleaners—the rock can cloud when the wrong chemicals are used. Marble was the wrong choice for this kitchen island. It was heavily scratched, chipped on the edges, and had a number of glass ring stains.  If they wanted to stick with a stone, they should have used granite, quartzite or a quartz-polyester resin called quartz surfacing. All of those stones are scratch resistant and unaffected by household chemicals. 

The following chart from the Use Natural Stone website, https://usenaturalstone.org, does a great job of comparing the many types of countertops that are on the market today. Decide on your budget, the uses and abuses the countertop is going to encounter, and then add in your own sense of style with the look you’re creating.

ARHTX has preferred vendors that we work with who provide consistent quality and excellent prices. We’ve used them for commercial and residential projects.