When you commission a custom marble or granite countertop for your kitchen, you choose a beautiful slab of natural stone to have cut down to your countertop size. Many people search galleries and warehouses until they fall in love with the perfect slab or two to complete their home design vision. But while your kitchen counter is being cut, where else could that gorgeous slab go in your home? Countertop and stone surface design is not limited to kitchen. You can use remnant and/or a second slab to expand your kitchen’s decorative theme to the entire house, use unique pieces of remnant, or choose a second accent slab for even more stone accents and useful surface features in your home.
Where can you decorate with granite and marble outside the kitchen? Let’s explore some of our favorite options.
Stone-Topped Half Walls
If you have even a strip of marble or granite left from your countertop slab, this can make an elegant topper for any half-wall in the house. Half-walls are often architectural details that help define one room from the next. A window pass-through from the kitchen to the family room or a half-wall between the entryway and den can make the perfect place for a beautiful piece of natural stone.
Using the same piece of marble or granite elegantly combines the color palettes, textures, and themes of your interior design as the stone flows from one room to the next. Placing a piece of natural stone on your halfwall provides weight and ambiance to your design while also providing a solid and useful surface.
A Glorious New Mantlepiece and Hearthstone
Your mantlepiece is the shelf just above the fireplace where family photos or honored artwork are displayed, This can be wood, brick, or a gorgeous piece of natural stone. A marble or granite mantlepiece is not unheard of and you can replace or clad your current mantlepiece to give your home a far more luxurious look around the fireplace.
Your hearthstone, the warm seat at the foot of the fireplace, can also be topped in warm granite which is heat resistant but warms wonderfully when exposed to the indirect heat of a nearby fire in the chamber. Give your home’s wintertime center a complete remodel, just with the stone left over from ordering custom kitchen counters.
Matching Bathroom Countertops
The single most popular and practical use for extra pieces of stone from a kitchen renovation is to replace your bathroom countertops as well. This unity of design throughout the house adds a sense of elegance while also getting your bathrooms a stylistic upgrade at a steal. When you have already purchased a slab, the remnant is yours to use. You can give your bathrooms elegant new countertops in solid slabs or have the remnant cut into geometric mosaic pieces for a more creative and composite countertop design of natural stone.
Marble Vanity Top
Vanities are built into some homes, especially if you have a spacious walk-in closet, dressing room, or master bath. A built-in vanity’s painted wood top might start to show age, but you can replace it with a gorgeous slab of natural stone instead. Both creamy marble and detailed granite look amazing in the bedroom suite as the beautiful stone topper to a built-in vanity. Soften the overhead lights and enjoy the cool surface of your natural stone vanity top each morning and evening when you go through your daily routine in an elegantly appointed bedroom suite.
Stone Sideboards and Built-In Shelves
In the dining room, you can place your pieces of marble or granite on the sideboards. Sideboard furniture and built-in sideboards provide extra space for dishes that are not currently on the table, platters about to be served, or as a buffet-style service for a more lively family event. Sideboards are also an elegant addition to any dining room, kitchen, or hallway where there is sufficient floor space. You can top your existing sideboards or even have ergonomically narrow sideboards built into your current home design and topped with elegant natural stone.
Marble or Granite Topping Your Home Bar
If you have a bar built into your home, it deserves a beautiful bar top. Polished wood may be lovely, but natural stone of granite or marble will make your at-home bar truly luxurious. Give your private space and top-shelf bottles the respect they deserve with a little clever use of your remaining stone slab design. Bars are often of interesting and swooping shapes, which may allow you to make more use of the slab itself.
Inlaid Marble Headboards
Did you know that you can inlay marble or granite into a bed’s headboard? You can make a “waterfall” headboard that is like a natural stone backsplash for the bed itself or lay in beautiful pieces of marble into the wood to create a unique and artistic pattern of natural stone. This is a wonderful way to make your bed and bedroom beautiful and avoid waste through thorough use of the slabs you began with.
Give your bed the elegance and luxury that good sleep deserves. You can, in fact, make a unique bed frame that no one else will have because yours is made from a natural stone slab that you hand-picked for your custom home renovation.
Stone Window Seats
Stone slabs can also make broad and comfortable seats. For example, a bay window’s seat could be clad in stone to make it more beautiful and gleaming during the day and a welcomingly beautiful space for children, cats, and guests to curl up in an afternoon sunbeam on warm, polished stone.
Window seats are a charming addition to many homes, especially those of older design. If you have deep window sills, deeper than three or four inches, then you can likely clad the sill in stone. Be sure to check that the frame is rated for both stone and seating, of course, before making a window modification.
Mosaic Backsplashes and Paving Stones
If you have only smaller pieces or unusual shapes left of your slab, you can make mosaic artwork with the remnant. Create yourself a beautiful backsplash in the kitchen, bathroom, or really anywhere in the house where you’d like a strip of elegant yet eclectic stone decor. Use the larger pieces as paving stones in your garden or even inlay them into a newly poured floor.
Natural stone mosaic is among the most beautiful things you can do with smaller pieces of stone remnant.
Elegant Stone Tables and Benches
Last but certainly not least, you can have furniture carved from your stone and given legs. After all, a granite slab with legs becomes a table. A low rectangle with low legs becomes a bench. You can furnish several items of your home with what’s left from a typical custom kitchen renovation. Give yourself a glowing coffee table shot with the same grain lines from your kitchen counters. Or create a breathtaking dining table of the same dark granite as your kitchen. You can even make a cute entryway bench with similar design principles
Here at Arch City Granite & Marble, we are passionate about not just kitchens, but all the possibilities of stone fabrication. Let us help you make the most of every slab – or even find unique pieces of remnant that contrast your kitchen instead of matching perfectly. We would love to help you add natural stone details throughout your home. Contact us today to speak with designers and stone fabricators who can bring your home to life with natural stone.