I love my granite bench tops

"no piece is alike, every block is different and carries its characteristics, and some kind of history behind it." Antony Architectural Stone

Three or four years ago we renovated/enlarged my kitchen. It took a while because it was a home done project by my husband and our builder friend. We tried the professionals but in the end our own plan was best and trusty IKEA supplied the basic structure.

When the cabinets were all in place we moved on to the bench tops. Because the cabinets we chose were a dark grey we had decided to have light coloured bench tops and thought that Caesar stone, which we had used elsewhere would be the best - much more practical and cheaper too. So we chose a marble kind of lookalike and fronted up at our favourite stone mason who took us around his workshop and store where we found the right Caesar stone. Then he looked at our plans, and told us that, alas, our island bench was too wide. By a mere centimetre or two. But enough to mean that there would be a join down the middle of the bench top. We should have gone to him first. Shock horror. My suggestion to the guys that they rejig the cabinets slightly met with fierce resistance - actually refusal, so back to the stonemason, who said we should consider granite.

So once again we wandered his storeroom - well not a room - a vast shed - and decided on the perfect stone only to discover that what he had was booked for somebody else and he thought it was unobtainable. So he sent me off to the wholesalers over in a part of Melbourne I did not know and I spent the afternoon visiting three different amazing warehouses, stocked full of the most beautiful huge pieces of stone I have ever seen. There were marbles, ranging in colour from black to white with every colour in the spectrum in between, including one in a rich royal blue. The markings on some were like fantastic abstract paintings and could be hung on a wall, if they weren't so heavy. There was a complex system of runners and crane type machinery to lift the slabs. Marble was not on my radar - beautiful but not practical as it is rather absorbent. Spill some red wine on it and it's ruined. I couldn't resist looking at them though.

Armed with my bits of cupboard front, timber wall lining and floor slate I rambled amongst the massive slabs of granite helped by the salesmen/owners and was about to decide on one particular slab - the type I had seen at the stonemasons, (called Ivory Fantasy) only to find in the next place that it had been reclassified as marble. And the best example I saw of this had a big crack across one corner. It's a little paler than my last choice.

So I took pictures, went home and pondered. Deciding in the end to go for the Ghibli granite that I had seen in the last, scruffiest but most inspiring warehouse. Yes you pick your actual block - in my case - two.

I worried that it was too plain, too earthy, too dark, bearing in min that my original plan had been to have something very light in colour. I worried even when it had been installed. But here's the thing about granite. The more you look at it the more you love it and the more you see things that you didn't see before. There are little shiny white bits of quartz here and there in mine, and satisfying streaks of grey that match the cupboards like bits of peachy colour that match the timber. And when the sun shines on it my heart sings. I love it. And so easy to maintain too. And in the end it was cheaper than the Caesar stone because I only needed two slabs as opposed to three.

I then saw that in Europe Ghibli is classed as granulite as opposed to granite. What's the difference you might ask?

"Granite is a very hard, granular, crystalline igneous rock which consists mainly of quartz, mica, and feldspar and is often used as building stone

Granulite is fine to medium grained metamorphic rock with a granular of polygonal crystals." Compare Rocks

Hmm, I'm not sure I am much clearer. Well yes I am. My ancient geography classes come back. Igneous is the melted magma, usually from volcanic eruptions, metamorphic is any kind of rock that has been transformed by heat and/or pressure. Anyway here Ghibli is classed as granite, though it's close cousin, Ivory fantasy which I slightly preferred, is, as I said earlier - now classed as a marble which makes sort of sense because marble is a metamorphic rock.

Whichever of these subtypes you are looking at though, when you look at it you are looking at earth's (not man's) ancient history.

"Western Australia is covered by granite, the largest single piece of Achaean rock that still lies on the surface of the Earth, that's 2.5 to 2.9 billion years old. It's one of the most ancient and intact bits of the Earth's crust. " Antony Gormley

I don't remember seeing any Australian granite for sale though. Most of it was from places like Brazil and India. Mine is apparently Precambrian and comes from southern India. Precambrian is the earliest period in earth's geological history, so when I look at my bench top I am looking at the beginning of the earth. If you want to know how a rock face becomes your kitchen bench watch this short video on YouTube. It's not very long and shows how difficult it is to do. The second cutting into thin slabs takes three days for one slab!

Some of the Caesar stone is also beautiful, but it's a manufactured beauty. You are not looking at earth's past as you cook the dinner. Granite is not just beautiful. Each piece is completely unique (also not like the Caesar stone), and changes with the light and how you look at it. Love it.