Choosing the ideal kitchen working tops

[IsabelleFreeman]

I’m planning to hire this bespoke kitchens Essex designer to help me build my cooking area, but haven’t decided on which working tops to use yet. Can you give some suggestions? I want one that looks really good but not that hard to maintain. For example, I like to have a gloss kitchen myself, but I don’t know if I can keep it spotless all the time!

Corian, dark marble/granite...

Watching with interest. I want pure white and can’t decide which.

Dark marble/granite looks awful if you can't keep it spotless. I've got a quartz top with all sorts of flecks - it's much more forgiving of the odd toast crumb.

Quartz doesn’t need to be sealed, unlike granite.

Corian can look like granite now, at a fraction of the cost.

I’ve seen some cement counter tops. They look good, but I’m not certain I would want one. I’ve heard the can crack.

A friend installed copper, like in a French bar. It looks beautiful and is surprisingly easy to maintain.

We've gone through a lot of worktops in the past 5 years.

In our current kitchen had a black granite worktop, this was hell to keep clean every little crumb and water mark showed up from across the room.

We replaced it with a gloss (not high gloss) white marble effect Quartz. It's hard wearing, looks good and isn't too bad to keep clean. However smudge marks do show up on it when the light hits it a certain way, so you have to polish it dry after wiping it down otherwise it'll look smeary.

House before our current one we had a beige speckled matt cornian worktop. It didn't look as premium or modern, but it was so easy to keep looking clean. This could be because it was matt finish and the room got no sunlight.

In our temporary rental we had black laminate worktop, this showed dirty and marks almost as badly as the black granite.

Based on this, if I had to choose a worktop again I'd go with the gloss quartz in a light colour again, it looks good and the hassle of having to quickly dry it off after wiping it down isn't too bad. The one thing I'd never get again is a black worktop.

Oh should also add.

The worktop company we used talked us out of white marble because it stains quite easily and is hard to maintain.

We have tan brown granite - which is black with reddish brown inclusions. It's much better than pure black granite as it doesn't show crumbs / watermarks particularly.

Neolith

We have black granite with inclusions, it's been absolutely fine and I would use it again.

We have got white quartz at the moment. Looks lovely but shows all the marks and stains (barkeepers friend works to clean it, but it's a pain). Just about to re-do the kitchen and are going with stainless steel. We've had steel before and it's brilliant, easy to clean, looks good and his properly heat proof too.

Corian, love it

We've got a dark granite at the moment, shows all smears and water marks.

In previous house we had a grey marble-look granite. Was amazing, looked fantastic and always looked perfect. No problems with staining or anything.