Considering quartz kitchen countertops for your home? Here are some facts to know about this material, as well as some quartz kitchen countertops pros and cons. Yes, there’s some actual quartz—sometimes a lot of it. All of this rock material mixed together and held together with binders is what gives a so-called quartz countertop the look and feel of stone. More accurately, a quartz countertop should probably be called engineered stone or compound stone—terms that more accurately describe the way these products are created. The industry, in fact, is increasingly using the term engineered stone to refer to this type of countertop. Bottom line: Quartz countertops can include some amount of actual quartz, but they include no solid quartz extracted from quarries and likely have lots of other materials in them, as well. Over 50 years later, Breton is still going strong and manufacturing quartz countertops. The process consists of blending pulverized natural stone aggregate with a mix of polymers, removing the air, and then heating and shaping the material into slabs that have the hardness and appearance of natural stone. Bretonstone technology has been licensed to more than 50 companies around the world, including such famous quartz brands as Silestone, Cambria, and Caesarstone. While these manufacturers add their own flair and nuances to their engineered stone countertops, they are still working off of that original brevetto, or patent, from Breton. Some forms of quartz countertops now include fragments of mirrors and other glass, brass metal filings, and various mixtures of granite and marble. Considerable effort goes into creating mixtures that produce unique looks. The Davis family business, now based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, began in the 1930s as a dairy business that gradually expanded into an association of several companies: St. Peter Creamery, Le Sueur Cheese Company, and Nicollet Food Products. It was not until 2000 that the Davis family began its entry into the engineered stone business by purchasing quartz processing equipment. Even today, the Davis family businesses supply large quantities of cheese each year to Kraft Foods. The Breton in the word Bretonstone is a portmanteau—a blended word composed of bre (for brevetti, roughly meaning “patents”) and ton (for the surname of founder Marcello Toncelli). Even the resins that compose the remaining 10 percent of a quartz countertop have become more natural and less synthetic. Breton’s trademarked term for this ingredient is “Biolenic Resins,” referring to a combination of artificial and organic resins, the latter derived from non-food vegetable oils. Quartz has come full circle because the very first material that inventor Marcello Toncelli developed was hand-poured mini slabs of about 12 by 20 inches, cut down and used for floor tiles. Countertop applications did not come until years later. Indeed, even in the mid-1970s, slabs only measured about 50 inches long—hardly a size one could call countertop-worthy. While granite-look quartz materials still ply the market in huge numbers, quartz that looks like nothing else is an increasingly popular segment. One example is Caesarstone. As if “modern” weren’t a current-enough style category for consumers, Caesarstone now has an “ultra-modern” category with offerings such as Apple Martini, Blizzard, and Crocodile. But this has one fortunate side effect for anyone who wants to install granite: lower prices due to less demand. Freedonia notes that “granite prices declined over the last decade, making the material more widely available.” Quartz countertops cost $15 to $70 per square foot on average. Meanwhile, granite costs roughly $15 to $140 per square foot. And marble will run you around $15 to $190 per square foot. On the inexpensive end, laminate costs on average $8 to $27 per square foot, and wood or butcher block costs $10 to $38 per square foot. Porcelain or ceramic tiles are also inexpensive countertop options at $3 to $28 and $1 to $15 per square foot, respectively. In addition, quartz does not scratch easily; in fact, granite tends to scratch easier than quartz. But extreme pressure can cause a scratch, chip, or crack. The good news is it’s possible to buff out light scratches with polish and get your countertops looking like new again. It’s also possible to fix deep scratches using an epoxy filler. However, the key is scratch prevention by doing things like always using cutting boards.
