Avocado

Olive green and dark brown moving through one another in soft layers, scored with sharp white lines that break at angles and pick out the boundaries between them. The colour is deep and saturated, and the slab reads like a landscape seen from above.

This is a warm dark, one of the few stones here that give green without being pale. It works against cream, natural timber and brass, and less well against cold grey. At 300 by 200 the slab is unusually wide and suited to an island, where the pattern opens out fully.

Quartzite is a metamorphic natural stone: quartz sand compacted under heat and pressure until it became a single crystalline rock. It is harder than marble and usually harder than granite — a knife, salt or a ceramic plate leave no mark — and unlike marble it does not etch from lemon or vinegar. It is porous, though: the slab is sealed before delivery, and resealing every year or two keeps it that way. There is no resin in it as there is in engineered quartz, so a hot pan will not scorch it — a trivet is still a good habit, particularly near an edge or a joint.

Every slab is one single piece of rock, and no two slabs of the same stone are ever identical. So we drive out to the supplier's yard with you, choose the actual slab there, and mark the layout on it before it is cut.