Deciding Between Quartz & Granite For Your Benchtops

While attempting to make a new look or feel in your kitchen, finding just the right benchtop is not always easy, and can also become extremely time-consuming. The wide variety of benchtop materials available don’t make the selection process any easier.

On top of finding a unique style that suits your space and decor perfectly, you also need to thing about the durability and the maintenance your benchtops will require.

Keeping these three elements in mind (style, durability, maintenance), let’s take a look at two of the major benchtop materials which are quite ideal in all three respects; namely, quartz and granite.

As a matter of fact, if you wanted to narrow down your search by a long short in one fell swoop, you could easily just limit your search to quartz or granite right away.

Both materials will bring a very appealing liveliness to your kitchen, and while both materials are not quite created equal in terms of durability and maintenance, they are both hard to beat in terms of style.

Quartz Benchtop

Quartz benchtops are made of natural quartz, which is actually one of the hardest substances found on earth, and generally little bits of glass or metallic flecks are added into it to give it some variety, the end result being a truly beautiful benchtop.

One of the greatest advantages of quartz is that it does not allow bacteria to grow in it and is also stain-resistant, both due to the fact that it is non-porous.

This makes clean-up easy and gives you peace of mind with respect to you and your family’s health.

Another benefit of the non-porousness is that quartz benchtops don’t need to be sealed.

Apart from these benefits regarding the durability and maintenance, quartz is definitely no slouch when it comes to beauty and style, and it comes in a very wide variety of colours so you can match your benchtops to your existing decor.

The options are just about endless, so you can go with natural colours like browns, blacks, and whites, or you can go wild with blues and oranges.

So all in all quartz offers definite performance advantages to other materials, but without making in sacrifices in the look or style department.

Granite Benchtops

Another very common benchtop material is granite which, like quartz, is extremely resilient. It is a natural rock which is cut and then polished for use in your home.

Staining, unfortunately, is a possibility with this material, so it is recommended to wash your benchtop well after each use with warm and soapy water (which will also help it to keep its shine).

Granite is a very strong material, however, and is very resistant to changes in temperature.

However because it is a natural stone it does not have the same colour variety that quartz does, and accordingly it will take some extra thought and planning in order to set up a kitchen that will harmonize with a granite benchtop.