Stainless steel kitchen worktops

Laminate, steel, glass, cement, reconstructed stone… you have a very wide range of materials to choose from for your kitchen worktop. Usually when you buy a kitchen, you don’t pay lots of attention to the worktop. You focus on finishings and colors and you want everything to be fine-tuned and elegant. Well, you have to think, instead, that the worktop has to have high quality and functionality standards. Each material has specifications that make it more or less right for your needs. These specifications together with the thickness you chose makes the price. So be careful and choose the worktop that best suits your needs and your budget. Let’s have a look at some of these materials.

Laminate is a very practical and inexpensive material. You can find it in many colors and finishings: from the wooden to the stone effect. It is made by a water-repellent chipboard sheet covered with a high pressure plastic laminate (HPL). It is scratch, abrasion, stain resistant, a little bit less resistant to heat so you have to be careful not to put hot pans and trays directly on the surface. You also have to seal it very well because you don’t want water to filter in. Water would make bubbles and it would make it crack.

The stainless steel top is well known for its extreme practicality and hygiene. It is chosen in professional kitchens but its more and more chosen in households because of its heat, bumps and stain resistance. Moreover thanks to welding you can make the sink top and the worktop seamless thus enhancing hygiene. The only problem with steel is its little resistance to scratches and it requires special detergents to eliminate fingerprints and other stains in order to keep it clean and shiny.

It’s the material that friends of the environment prefer because it’s a natural product and it’s bound to impress. As all wooden furniture, a wooden worktop requires special treatment to keep its beauty but even if it is precious and pleasant to touch it isn’t that practical. A solid wood worktop is very delicate. It gets scratched and it can get abrasions very easily and it is bound to be stained and to absorb humidity and heat.

Among natural stones we have marble and granite. This kind of top is pretty expensive because it is very precious and it has a high aesthetic impact factor which is why it is often chosen. It is really elegant but not as practical because marble and granite are porous materials which tend to absorb liquids and therefore to get stained. More, they don’t like acid liquids such as lemon, coffee, coke: they might damage the surface permanently. These inconveniences, though, can be solved by treating the surfaces adequately closing the pores and making it liquid-proof. This treatment has to be done at least once a year. .