Ocean Blue

Despite the name, this is a warm stone: a ground of sand, cream and pale grey in dense horizontal layers, with fine gold-brown lines running along it. The look is very close to timber grain or to a section through sandstone, and it is continuous across the slab.

The strong directionality does the work here: on a long run the lines stretch the room, and on a splashback they read like a textile. The warm mid tone hides crumbs and dust far better than a white, which is a good reason to choose it for a kitchen in use.

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.