More colors than any other stone here
Black leads, then blue, brown, white, gray, green, multicolor and yellow, with smaller groups behind them. No other material in our slab range spreads across so many colors, and it is not close. Marble is dominated by white and gray; quartzite by white and gray with a few exceptions. Granite covers the whole board.
That has a practical consequence for anyone who has already fixed a color and is looking for a stone to match it. Starting from the color rather than from the material tends to end in granite, simply because it is the only place several of those colors exist at all.
Blue granite
Blue is the least common color in our stone, and it comes from two materials: granite and quartzite. They are not interchangeable. A granite blue comes from minerals carried in the crystal structure itself, which is why it reads as a saturated field of color; a blue quartzite carries its color in banding and movement instead. Anyone searching for blue stone should be looking at both, and the quartzite page covers the other half.
Within the granites the same split appears again. Azul Bahia is a deep saturated blue that behaves as a single color; Patagonia Blue is a large scale pattern with blue among several other colors. One is a color decision and the other is a pattern decision, and they are rarely substitutes for each other even though both answer to the same search.
Speckle and not vein, and what that changes
Granite carries its figure as a crystalline speckle spread evenly across the stone rather than as veins running through it. Some granites do carry movement, so this is a tendency rather than a rule, but it holds for most of what is here.
The practical effect shows up at joins. A veined stone has to be matched across a seam or the pattern visibly breaks, which limits how a long run or a returning corner can be cut. An evenly speckled one carries a join far better, because there is no pattern to interrupt. On a large kitchen made from several pieces of stone, that is the difference between a join you notice and one you do not.
What granite resists
The care notes across this range are consistent on two points. Granite takes scratches and heat better than marble does, which is the honest reason it became the standard kitchen stone. And it is still a natural stone that those same notes ask to be sealed, periodically rather than once.
The second point gets left out of most writing about granite. A polished granite face can be dulled by acidic cleaners over time, and the stone can take a stain if a spill is left on it. The gap between granite and marble here is real and it is wide, but it is a gap in degree, not a change in kind.
Mostly polished, with four alternatives
Roughly seven in ten of these slabs are polished. Honed, leathered, textured and brushed make up the rest, along with a few that combine two finishes on one slab.
Leathering suits granite particularly well. The process works the surface until the softer minerals give way before the harder ones do, so the texture that results follows the stone's own crystal structure, rather than being pressed onto it, and a leathered granite still reads unmistakably as granite. A honed granite gives a flat matte surface instead, closer to how a concrete countertop reads. Both come up on a dark stone, which the black slab page goes into.
Not only a countertop stone
In our own range granite turns up specified for walls slightly more often than for countertops, with showers close behind and floors barely at all. We are describing our shelves, not the market, but it bears saying, because the countertop reputation stops most people looking at granite for a wall at all.
Almost all of it comes in at 1 1/4 inch, with a small group at 3/4 inch. The thicker stone is what spans a run of cabinets; the thinner one clads a wall or tops a vanity. The stone slab page takes up how lots, selection and fabrication work across every material here.
