Granite countertops can add value and light to your home in a way that no other type of countertop can do. Even the darkest colored granite simply gleams when it is polished up, rounded, beveled, curved perfectly to fit your space, and under the beautiful lighting of your dream kitchen.
Normally you have to go to a showroom to pick out the stone that is right for you and your home, but you can start to understand the kind of luxury stone options available on the market for granite countertops by looking up pictures of polished stones under the various technical terms:
- Granite – The best-known igneous rock, granite is defined by geologists as light-colored igneous rock with grains visible to the eye and mainly composed of quartz and feldspar
- Diorite – Coarse-grained stone that looks like a cross between truest granite and basalt
- Gabbro – Black or dark green intrusive igneous rock with coarse-grained minerals
- Basalt – Similar to gabbro, but more fine-grained
- Diabase – Dark gray to black in color and similar to gabbro in composition
- Pegmatite – Extreme igneous rocks that form last during the crystallization of magma, which means that they can contain very large crystals by comparison and often trap other minerals in with them that aren’t commonly found in other rock compositions
- Schist – Bands and lenses of black and white (salt and pepper-looking) rock
Other stones you may consider researching images of before your showroom visit include gneiss, syenite, monzonite, anorthosite, and granodiorite. This will surely get you excited about the many possibilities for your new granite countertops.
