Granite countertops are much-coveted throughout the country for their beauty and elegance, and granite kitchen islands are usually lumped into the same category. At Arch City Granite in St. Louis, however, we’ve seen many of our customers design magnificent kitchen islands with our help, and we think the granite kitchen island deserves a spotlight of its own.
Kitchen granite islands deserve very special attention because it is the place where your family gathers for a meal or a family chitchat and it also tends to be the biggest piece of your kitchen area. You can make it into a magnificent piece of attraction so special attention needs to be paid to the island.
You may be spending lot of time searching for suitable granite or quartz slabs for your kitchen island and you may also be thinking about various shapes and sizes for your future island. Availability of numerous options may be another reason for your confusion. You may be worried that designing the island wrong may jeopardize your entire kitchen project.
We at Arch City Granite totally understand your dilemma over the selection. We have worked with many home owners with similar situations. We have helped many home owners in the St. Louis area to realize their ideas into beautiful pieces of attraction. We have designed and fabricated hundreds of custom shaped kitchen granite islands.
You may gain very detailed knowledge to help you design your future kitchen island by going through the following article. We are glad to share with you our experiences in fabricating and installing custom shaped islands.
Highlight a Unique Slab of Granite
One of the virtues of granite countertops is that no two batches of granite are exactly alike. There are different speckles and patterns and veins running through each slab. Sometimes a customer finds a piece that’s just begging to be the center of attention. Maybe it has a gorgeous swirl in the center, a series of crisscrossing veins, or patches of color that rise to the surface in a unique way.
Whatever the reason, this particular piece has captured their imagination. It’s a work of art formed by nature and they want to give it a central place in their décor. This brings us to the next step: designing the perfect shape and size of the island to both fit the kitchen and showcase the beauty of this unique piece.
Design a Shape and Size
When you’re designing a kitchen island, we highly recommend you work with a professional – and if you’re in St. Louis, you couldn’t find a more enthusiastic crowd of professionals to work with than the people at Arch City Granite. We’ll help you design an island that complements the shape of the room and show you how we’ll cut your piece to fit that shape and highlight the assets that caught your eye to begin with.
Some of our customers want an unusually shaped island, one that isn’t a simple rectangle or square. We’re happy to oblige. With our CNC machine we can make precise cuts in a very efficient manor, helping us create your custom island without the extraordinary labor costs you might find at a company with less sophisticated technology.
Select a suitable Edge Profile
You have to choose an edge profile that goes around your kitchen island. This depends on the style of your kitchen cabinetry and surrounding décor. Is it contemporary, traditional or transitional? Depending on the style and your taste you can pick Ogee or Roman Elite for traditional kitchens or beveled edge or pencil edge for contemporary kitchens.
There is a design trend in the St. Louis area to go for a simple edge like half round for all perimeter countertops and put focus the island with an upgraded edge like Ogee or Roman Elite edge.
You may also go with a double laminated edge profile for the island to make it stand out from the rest of the kitchen countertops. In a laminated edge two granite pieces of 3 cm are given two different edges like Ogee on one piece and Full Bullnose on the other piece and are glued together to give an appearance of a 6 cm thick island.
Decide on a Base
Some people prefer to have the base of their island match the rest of their kitchen cabinets, but if you’re going to invest in a unique piece of granite to highlight in the center of your kitchen, you may want to make it stand out in more ways than stone. If you have white cabinets, you might decide to give your island a dark wood or a cherry finish, depending on the type of stone you’ve chosen.
(If you’d like to know what colors of cabinets go well with different sorts of granite, check out the “How to select right granite” page for reference.)
You’ll also want to decide what practical purpose your island will serve underneath. Obviously the top is a countertop, but you can have an open-air island, one that’s composed of drawers and cabinets, one that serves as a wine rack or a combination of all of the above. We’ve even seen some that have cunning bump-outs for spices or baking sheets. What do you need most?
Consider the Rest of the Kitchen
When you choose a unique island, you can make the rest of your countertops match the type of granite you’ve chosen (though naturally the piece covering your island will be the most beautiful and eye-catching) or you can let the other countertops serve as a contrast to your central piece. Using a different type of countertop surface such as a complementary but different granite, or even quartz surfaces like Silestone or Caesarstone, can let your island shine as the focal point of the room.
Light It Up
Almost invariably, if you decide on a beautiful, unique piece of granite or marble for your kitchen island, you’re going to want island lighting. Island lighting is a line of lights that are centered down the length of your island, usually about three feet above the surface of the countertop.
Island lighting is partially for visibility while working on the countertop, but that’s not its only practical use – after all, strong overhead lighting would be able to accomplish the same thing. Island lighting is particularly useful for highlighting the beauty of the countertop’s surface. Gold-toned lights (as opposed to white-toned lights) can bring out the depth and intricacy of a piece of granite, making your island one of the focal points of the room.
Feeling Creative?
At Arch City Granite in St. Louis, we love guiding our customers around our showroom of unique pieces, and we’re always delighted to participate in creative projects like custom islands. We’re able to create these kinds of pieces much more quickly than others are, too, since we have the technology for precision work and the expertise to guide you through what’s possible and what the stone can’t quite accommodate.
If you’d like help creating a beautiful piece you’ll be proud to see your kitchen revolve around, let us know what you envision, and we’ll do our best to find a piece of granite that’s simply calling your name.