This weekend I chose my marble slabs — the ones I'm standing in front of here are mine. When you're renovating a kitchen you have to count yourself lucky to live in a city with proximity to stone yards with optimal selection. This is my fourth kitchen renovation, and ABS Stone in Long Island City, NY, is without exaggeration, the best stone yard I've ever visited.
This was our second visit. On our first visit we were introduced to Beata, one of the two sisters who source the stone for this place. She has a background in the arts, and it shows. The sisters have their finger on the pulse of kitchen design and when choosing samples they have "an eye." As Beatta walked me around, she let me stop at anything that caught my eye and asked me to explain what I liked about that slab. What I liked was a pure white field with a dark vein—high contrast. Then she showed me something that I didn't know even existed: Paonazzo. Paonazzo is a marble with a white (sometimes yellow) field and a deep, dramatic, gray vein—so dark it often reads navy.
I fell in love at first sight.
Our backsplash is too long to be cut from a single slab, so I am going to ask our fabricators do something called ‘book matching.’ When you bookmatch, you choose two slabs from the same batch and match them up along the seam so they are a mirrored reflection of each other. If we bookmatch these two slabs and have them meet in the center over the cooktop, I'll have very dramatic backsplash, indeed. We’re doing this!
Follow the Renovation Diary:
No comments:
Post a Comment