corian or granite kitchen work surface

[blue22]

Anyone used Corian as a worktop surface in their kitchen?
I would like granite, but DH very keen on Corian - I don't know much about it....

I have corian and wish I'd had granite. depends on the wear and tear, but my dh cooks every day, has lots of heavy pans. roasting trays, chopping things ( on a board) grinding things, pestle and mortar etc and I don't think the Corian has stood up that well. It's covered in minute scratches( it's white) Also got Corian sink and it is getting a bit discoloured after 3 years. We cook( and therefore wash up) a lot with tomatoes, curries, generally high-coloured foods IYSWIM and although I clean it regularly it's definitely lost its whiteness. I use barkeepers friend to clean it which works well, but is not easy to buy where I live.
The Corian also goes up behind hob, as a splashback, and that's really good, seam-free, easy to clean and very smart looking.

We've got black granite and I love it. Looks smart, easy to clean and you can put down hot dishes straight from the oven no problem.

Marking this as need to make the same decision. Was put off granite by SIL who has recently had it in her new kitchen and is forever polishing it to remove fingerprints and smears - but then she has plain black granite and the more bitty/sparkly ones probably don't show marks so much. They seem to be similar prices.

My MIL has slate and loves it but I haven't really looked into that yet.

I'm deciding too and am almost decided on granite. My researches tell me that slate can mark very easily with acids - lemon juice, tomatoes etc.

I've got quartz and I love it, it's totally indestructible and a bit cheaper than granite (and I hated the black colour).

Just been googling to get an idea of prices and found Stone Masters. Anyone used them? Or can recommend another company?

My parents have Corian in their kitchen and they love it, and so do I. It looks absolutely fantastic and has no signs of wear and tear on it at all. Theirs is an off white pinky-beige type colour.

my parents had corian and now have granite.

granite gets my vote every time

Don't get slate. I had a slate draining board once, next to a butlers sink. It scratched easily, and had to be oiled to look anything other than dull and dusty.

I have Silestone, which is like a manhandled Quartz - all the bits taken out. I wanted a thin totally white top with no bits that was easy maintenance as I cook a lot and am very clumsy with hot pans etc, so wood no good.

I love it, it looks great, is very low maintenance and would highly recommend it.

In our old kitchen we had a composite, which is granite ground up and mixed with resin - you get a wider range of colours, ours was pale grey but quite mixed up colours so didn't show fingerprints etc. I loved it.

Now we have white corian and DO NOT GET WHITE CORIAN.

DELHI, have you tried using baking soda to clean it? I find it works well and is cheap and readily available.

I had slate - looked beautiful and I didn't do much to maintain it. I did spill lemon juice on it the first day and a huge white stain appeared, I was gutted but the fitter told me to rub some olive oil into it and it disappeared overnight.

Thanks Alark will give the baking soda a go!

I used to be Product Manager for a similar product to Corian but produced by ICI (same chemical composition).

IIRC (it was a looooong time ago - c20+ years ago ), you should be able to use any abrasive cleaner (like Ajax) to clean away any stains - and you shouldn't have a probl with a light patch with it being white (again, iirc, that was the problem with darker colours, which was what ICI was going to intruduce). It is less reactive than a polyester based resin like Silestone and easier to clean abrasively, as the acrylic (same stuff as Perspex) and the filler (a fire retardant powder) have similar "softness", unlike polyester and silica, where abrasive cleaning just causes roughness around the silica/sand.

Having said all of that, while the seamlessness of Corian attracts (and I still have photos of beautiful kitchens, bathrooms and shop/bar fittings done in the ICI product), I'd still choose granite for my kitchen.

It is the hardest, least reactive, most heat resistant thing around. It was the standard we did all our tests against.

That is interesting prettybird - did you test quartz at all? Thought that was supposed to be harder than granite.

Don't recall Quartz worktops being on the market at the time: but anything that is silica filled (like Asterite sinks and some of the polyester resins) will suffer from the fact that quartz is harder than anything else - so if you scrub at it, you'll just abrade around the granules - which will then make that patch more vulnerable to staining.

I'm a kitchen designer and favour pale but speckled quartz. Doesn't show up the dirt and is very hard wearing and forgiving. A recent client used Granite 4 you and they were very good and very cheap