Blue slab materials
Quartzite leads here, with marble and granite behind it in close to equal numbers. Each arrives at its blue by a different route, which is why they rarely stand in for one another.
The quartzites, the Ijen and Macaubas family among them, carry blue in bands and movement, so the stone reads as a pattern with blue running through it. The marbles, Palissandro among them, are pale stones with blue gray veining, so the blue sits in the line, not in the ground. The granites, Azul Bahia among them, carry it in the minerals themselves.
Blue granite and labradorescence
Blue arrives in granite by two different routes. In some stones, Azul Bahia among them, it is genuine mineral color and the blue is simply there. In others it is optical: crystals in the stone return light at particular angles, so the color flashes and shifts as you move past it. The same effect appears in green and gray stones too, but it is in the blues that it is most often the reason the slab was chosen.
Which of the two a particular granite is decides how it behaves once installed. A mineral blue looks the same from every position in the room. An optical one changes as you cross the kitchen, which is either the best thing about it or an unwelcome surprise, depending on whether it was expected.
Polished blue stone
More than eight in ten of the slabs here are polished, with honed, lappato, textured and leathered accounting for the rest. In our brown and beige ranges the matte and textured finishes take a far larger share than that.
Two reasons sit behind it. A polished surface holds saturation, and blue is a color people choose for the color, not for the texture. And where the blue is optical instead of mineral, the effect only appears on a surface that returns light, so a polish is what makes that particular stone do what it was bought to do.
Saturated and pale blues
The range runs from stones that read unmistakably as a color to pale stones with a cool blue cast. Both are sold as blue, and each does a different job.
A saturated blue is a feature decision: it announces itself and the room is then built around it, which is why it usually appears as an island, a single wall or a vanity. A quiet blue works as a cool neutral and can run through a whole scheme. Deciding which of the two a room wants before looking at slabs makes the shortlist much shorter.
Behavior by material
Two blue slabs side by side can be a quartzite and a marble, and everything about how they behave sits in that name rather than in anything visible. The quartzites here are written up as resisting wear well and still wanting a sealer in a kitchen; the marbles carry the carbonate chemistry the marble page sets out; the granites are the group with the optical color.
In practice that means the material governs where the stone goes and the color governs how much of it the room can take. Those are two separate decisions, and they are easy to run together when the color is this unusual.
Blue slab thickness and sizes
Most of the natural stone here is 1 1/4 inch with a smaller 3/4 inch group, each piece at whatever size its block allowed. The two porcelain sheets in the collection arrive at a fixed size instead.
The quartzite and granite pages set out those materials in full, and the stone slab overview covers how lots and selection work.
