Life’s quite hectic enough these days without adding to the workload with extra kitchen cleaning duties – so when you start choosing those last, luxurious finishing touches for your swanky new kitchen it’s worth taking some time out to think about your lifestyle before making a decision. Do you really want to add another kitchen chore to the list when you get home after a busy day? Because, leaving aside the cost implications for now, some worktop materials will require far more maintenance effort from you than others.
Granite, for instance, always looks great – but like so many great beauties, it’s a high-maintenance affair. If you want it always at its gleaming, almost glittering, high-sheen best, there’s no substitute for a bit (or actually rather a lot) of good old-fashioned ‘elbow grease’. In other words, you’re in for a fair amount of polishing and buffing – but then again you may well think that lustrous finish is well worth the effort. Then there’s the sealing – you only need to do it once every 5 to fifteen years, depending how much work goes on in your kitchen. (You can check whether you need to re-seal a granite worktop by leaving a tablespoonful of tap water on it for 15 minutes or so – if it darkens the surface you need to re-seal!)
Marble’s another popular option – and you’d think it would be pretty impervious to staining and waterpenetration but actually, because it’s porous, it’s very easily stained – and there’s nothing like an inground tea or coffee mark to spoil your kitchen’s gleaming grandeur. Most of the time, though, spills on marble worktops aren’t a problem, as long as you wipe them straight away with a damp cloth. Stains are usually fairly easy to remove unless they’ve really soaked in, in which case it gets more complicated.
Similarly, you’d think a concrete worktop would be pretty straightforward – but although they look great, they too are porous and prone to staining and need to be waxed or sealed.
So what’s the answer if you want a high-end look with the absolute minimum of maintenance? Well, a high-density stone such as soapstone is an option. Because it’s so dense, water (and stains, hardly get a look in. A word of warning, though, it does tend to get darker with age – and many people love that aged look: if you’re not one of them, it still means getting out the sander! Well, don’t look down your nose at laminates – not only are they dead easy to clean and almost impossible to stain, the latest styles look amazing too.
On the more novel side, you might consider zinc! Not only is it trendy, it’s also stain-resistant and antibacterial – and it develops a beautiful patina as it ages…
Then there’s lava stone, recycled glass, EcoTops made of bamboo and paper composite and more besides, each with its own pros and cons…
And that leaves one group of materials that’s totally non-porous and gives you all that lustre and shine with no maintenance whatsoever (unless you count a wipe with soap and water!): Engineered stone! Confusingly, this is often simply labelled as quartz but is in fact composed of crushed stone with a polymer resin as a bonding agent to create a rock solid (excuse the pun), totally non-porous surface that’s super scratch-resistant.
And the great thing is that it comes in so many finishes from brand names such as Silestone, Cimstone, Arenastone, Diresco Quartz, Technistone Quartz and Compac Quartz, each with their own unique style and special qualities. For fans of that classic marble look there’s even marble-style quartz and, finally, don’t be deterred if you’re on a limited budget because quartz isn’t just a low-maintenance option – it can be very affordable too!
