Cristallo Pink

A pale, half-translucent stone washed with a rose-lilac blush, very soft and without hard edges — like colour bled into water. Here and there a thin rust line surfaces, and crystalline planes within the ground catch the light at different angles.

It is delicate in appearance and not in behaviour: it is a quartzite, and it will take real kitchen work. It looks best given natural light and a restrained backdrop — cream, broken white or bleached oak cabinetry. On an island with a waterfall edge its translucency shows most at the corner.

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.