Marble Countertops: Tell Before You Sell
Not that every marble buyer is guaranteed a bad experience. Certainly, fabricators have other options besides steering would-be buyers away from marble. One is to sell the product honed rather than polished.
Woodward says Baker only sells marble and limestone kitchen countertops with a honed finish, and Stasswender says he strongly recommends it.
Click photo to enlarge“We recommend it be honed because the scratches don’t show as much unless you gouge it,” he says. “Sealer also works better on a honed material than it does on a highly polished one because the pores are still open.”
Luckily, he adds, many buyers of both marble and limestone aren’t looking for the high-tech appearance polished stone offers. The honed finish gives it more of an old-fashioned look.
Stains-and-all is also a look that some people seek – or at least don’t mind – with their marble.
“There are people who want it to look old,” says Cangelosi. “They like the patina. It’s what happens in Europe, where they’ve been using marble in countertops for hundreds of years. They expect it to age and they don’t have a problem with it.”
Woodward says he has Carrara marble in his own kitchen, and he loves it.
“The beauty of having a white marble kitchen is that it looks like an old deli top, and that’s a very, very nice look,” he says. “I have to say mine is nicer than when I put it in.”
HANDLE WITH CARE
While buyers of marble countertops will have certain drawbacks to reckon with, fabricators and installers find the material presents its own issues as it goes from slab to kitchen..
Some of it may simply be that today most people have more experience working with granite, but the reality is that not all marbles are created equal. The Marble Institute of America breaks marbles into four categories, based on the amount of personal attention their fabrication requires.
“The classifications aren’t meant to render judgment on the marble,” stresses Great Lakes’ Booms. “An ‘A’ will require very little, if any, more attention than a good, hard granite will. At the other end of the spectrum, a ‘D’ material is typically a very dramatic material with lots of veining and occlusions and banding. Sometimes those materials have a tendency to show dry seams or they may crack, and you’re going to be doing some gluing and sticking and refinishing of those materials.”
The good news is that among the “A” materials are popular whites such as the Carraras and the calacatas. Southwest Marble’s Stasswender says he treats those just as he would granite. However, other marbles – he cites Crema Marfil and Rainforest Green, as examples – generate a production factor.
“We’ll charge 25-percent- or 50-percent-more for the labor, only because we know it’s going to separate and we’ll have to glue it back together, rod it, and re-polish it or re-hone it,” he says.
All Granite’s Siewior says for that shop, an important part of marble fabrication is making sure the pieces are reinforced.
“We reinforce all those exposed pieces that are likely to get abuse, such as the corners of an island,” he says. “We also use steel rods to make it stronger, especially when we mount double sinks with a ridge in between them. The same is true with longer backsplashes.”
Woodward says Baker Marble has had some success keeping its customers using Carrara, and the company also works with 3cm material when it’s available.
