Materials That Tell a Story

We talk about various materials choices a lot. There are some materials we are drawn to, and others we resist using, at least at first. Some we like, and some we don't like so much. There are several categories, or criteria, used to judge what materials are good for a kitchen project, or maybe for any building project:

Here's a few I see a lot:

·       innovative

·       in style

·       impervious to damage – stays new looking

·       expensive, on the idea that more expensive is better

·       green, non-toxic, low VOC

Though we're on board with the green category, we often lean in another direction.

·       local material, local source

·       natural materials

·       you can tell what the material is by looking at it

·       functional, not just for show

·       repairable

·       affordable

Jim in the kitchen with retro Formica counter

Close-up of the Formica counter

But it's hard to make rules for these things. These photo shows a kitchen, not quite done, where the counters are made of Formica, in a completely retro pattern, I think from the fifties. It even has that shiny metal edging. This was our customer, David Demnitz's idea. This stuff isn't particularly natural, or green, or repairable, and it certainly isn't local. But I really like it. I'm really glad David chose it. (That's Jim in the picture, not David).

Countertop with warm green tones

Here's another example. It's that material often referred to as quartz, but it really ground up quartz, mixed with polymers and pigments. It's sold in all sorts of patterns and colors. This particular one is a nice, sort of slatey, understated pattern, in a warm greenish color. Not a natural material by any means, but really lovely. As well as rugged and resistant to damage. I'd have been likely to select a soapstone or maybe slate materials, but I'm really glad our customer here, Carole Colsell, picked this.

So I'm revising, or expanding, my categories a little.

I do continue to like natural, local, materials, but also I like materials – and for that matter details – which tell a story. That's what's great about David's Formica. Twenty years from now, I'll be able to think about the person who picked it and what might have led to that choice, what they might have been thinking about at the time.

Wood drawer fronts with a story to tell

Wood is perhaps the material that does this best. The picture shows some bird's-eye and curly maple used as drawer fronts. I think Ian saved this group of boards out of a larger project – boards that had both light sapwood and dark heartwood, in these very elegant figured boards. Todd put them together very thoughtfully into the drawer fronts. Very lovely, but they also tell quite a complex story, that anyone later will be able to see. Obviously, somebody, (really two people here), went to a lot of trouble to make this; it wasn't just thrown together, it was thought about. A Vermonter could probably deduce that it was relatively local wood: southern birds-eye has a very different look. You could also know that somebody at a sawmill, or out in the woods, was on the lookout for this beautiful stuff and knew how to identify it in the rough log or board, and took very good care of it. There is a very good chance that over the years many people will look at this cabinet, remark on it, and maybe talked about it over a glass of wine, and ask what causes bird's-eye – which currently isn't really known for sure.

Patinable. I like materials that can take a bit of abuse with grace. With months and years of use, they don't look shabby or beat up exactly, but get a bit of patina. A lot of materials now popular are nearly impervious to the marks of work and life. You can't scratch them or stain them. That quartz stuff is like that, and so is a lot of granite. I prefer slate or soapstone precisely because it shows the abuse a little, without lessening its functionality. A soapstone counter fifty years old may have some dings in it, but put some oil on it, and it will look great. It shows that many people have used it and worked at it.

For me those people, even if I don't know who they are, are present with me a little bit when I use the counter or am near it. It's not just a counter but a tablet that records some history.

Of course, not all our clients are that happy when their new counter gets it's first dose of patina; A black ring or a knife scratch might to them look like a black ring or a knife scratch. Fortunately, many of these “patinable” materials are also reparable. Defects can be scraped or sanded out.

A wood counter may get some scratches, food stains, and maybe black marks from the carbon steel knife. When it gets annoying, you can scrub, scrape, or sand the surface, re-oil, and start again. It won't be new looking, but will look better, while a bit of the story stays behind on the surface.

Other materials, like many plastic laminates, are tough, but when they break down, or look shabby, there is nothing to be done, short of replacing them.

Keeping Your Counters New Looking, and their Patina too!

In our work, we build, buy, and install a lot of counters. Right now, we use a lot of commercial butcher block, and also make a lot of wood counters. Our friends Pat Garrett and Shane Thurston make a lot of slate and soapstone counters for us. Occasionally we get into granite tops. Recently we've been using a green MDF product called Valchromat, which is easy to work, and has some of the virtues of stone counters. We still do a little Formica since it is such an inexpensive option, and let's face it, works pretty well.

Recently some of our customers have gotten in touch with us because their counters didn't stay new-looking. One was a slate counter, with under-mount sink, that got a little spotty under the drain board. The other was oiled butcher block that got drab -looking over time, after several years of food prep. That's fine – we'll do our best to fix these problems.

This got me thinking about my own counters. I think, between the apartments I've rented, the houses we've owned or co-owned, my little boat, and my late-lamented trailer, I've build myself about 20 or 25 counters. A couple of early ones were plywood, coated with fiberglass. Several others were plywood that was heavily varnished with oil-based varnish. These were intended as temporary counters, but at least three are still in use decades later. But most of them were wooden planks, glued edge to edge. Usually they were made out of whatever wood came to hand. Walnut, ash, red oak, white oak (that's nice!), mahogany, teak, sometime pine. Most of these oiled counters are still in service, except for the ones in that late lamented trailer.

I always thought of these kitchens as workplaces, analogous more to a woodshop or restaurant kitchen than to some kind of showplace. The wood counters were oiled with ordinary salad oil, sometimes mineral oil or tung oil. We chopped veggies of all kinds right on the counter. We rolled out the dough right on the counter. Except for meat, and particularly poultry, most foods we ate were in direct contact with these counters. We learned to take one precaution: don't let that carbon steel knife sit in a puddle or orange juice for too long, or you'll have a nice black chevron that will have to be scraped out.

Here is my current batch. This is the before picture.

The island is made from some ash planks. The green ones are Fireslate II, a concrete counter similar to your counters in chem lab. To the left is a commercial Boos butcher block. In the distance is a varnished pine table I made about 40 years ago.

In the great tradition of kitchen photography, I took this occasion to do the annual maintenance which I do every three or four years. I scrubbed the counters, dried them off, and gave them another dose of salad oil, including the Fireslate II.

If I saw stains or other defects at this point, I could have sanded or scraped them out. But as you can see, I did not do that.

Right from the first day, these counters have taken a terrific beating. It would be impossible to count the scratches in this wood. After all, just cutting up three cloves of garlic might lead to fifty unkind cuts. These fifteen or twenty year old counters have been hacked thousands of times. They have also been stained and re-stained over and over by beets, strawberries, coffee and lots of other foods. They have been used and abused.

The hardwood tops can take this pretty well; they can always be brought back to reasonable condition, ad infinitum. The Fireslate, like some natural stones, can get stains. Because of how much water they get, the oil finish gets drawn out pretty fast. That poor soft pine table in the background has really suffered. It's got scratches, divots, places where ball point pens have sort of printed through onto the soft wood.

I love these counters. These are nice, honest materials. You could find counters made a century or five centuries ago that were made much the same way. They'll last pretty much forever, and if they fail, they can be repaired.

They tell a story. People have been living here! They cook for each other. They eat a lot of vegetables! They chop up their garlic instead of buying it powdered. Why, they don't even take good care of that nice pine table! I see these honorably damaged surfaces, and remember the meals, the singing parties, the pizzas, the bread dough. The bread I'm slicing now, is somehow linked to all the meals that came before, all the people I've spent time with here. To be sentimental, the worn surface has some meaning for me; I hope I get to see it even more battered, to see the surface even more uneven than today.

When I revisit some of their older cousins (now owned by other people) I see they are still being put to work on a daily basis. You have no idea what a good feeling that is for a carpenter, to see something you've made going strong years later.

As we work with families developing their kitchen designs, we talk about what functions they want each counter to serve. We talk about what material fits with the work done at that work station. We take them to see kitchens we did a few years ago. If we're using slate, I'd like them to see what it's going to look like in a few years.

If they want a counter that will stay new-looking a long time, maybe we'll end up with those granite tops, or engineered quartz, or even on occasion, “solid surface.” If they choose maple or ash or soapstone or slate, I'll be glad. But I'll also be careful to say (once burned, twice shy), “These are patina materials. They'll last a long time, but they'll show their history, too.”

Valchromat, what is that?

Ann Smith's Valchromat sink counter

Most of our projects have undermount sinks. They look great in an old timey way, and function much better than the usual “drop-in” sinks that have that ledge around the edge. It's much easier to cleanup around the sink, you can just sweep stuff from the counter into the sink. It also works much better for draining dishes, you don't get those puddles on the counter. Not to mention how nice the undermount style looks.

We usually use stone for these counters, but are always looking for less costly alternatives. Not everybody can afford slate, soapstone, or granite.

What's the alternative? An undermount sink in a wood counter is asking for trouble. Tile eventually fails. Laminates don't work because the edge of the plywood is exposed.

One of our clients, Ann Smith, asked us to do her sink counter with Valchromat. Valchro what?

We had never heard of it. It turns out to be a European, fairly green, “medium density fibreboard”. Though it can swell, it doesn't break down when wet. It comes in a lot of wonderful colors, and the colors go all the way through. It comes in 49 X 98 sheets, 3/4” thick (slate colored one 1” thickness). It costs about $200 per sheet For a waterproof counter, that is very inexpensive.

Valchromat is incredibly easy to sand, saw, or route using ordinary woodworking tools. At Ann's, we made a plywood template for the sink cutout, followed it with a ordinary router bit, and sanded it. This stuff is flat, stable, doesn't chip out, really nice to work with.

I love the colors. We've put every sort of finish on it, including oil based poly and various oil finishes. With certain oil finishes, or an “oil wax” it looks very beautiful, sort of leathery. It's not impervious like stainless steel or maybe granite. Like wood or soapstone, it does best if given a new coat of oil when it looks dried out or uneven. This is a “patina material” not a “stays new looking forever” material. Ian is still experimenting with different finishes to find the best choices.

It's a revelation making a set of drawer fronts, or a cabinet door, out of Valchromat. If we're making, say, a bank of ash or pine drawers, we have to get the wood, plane it, glue up a panel, cut out the drawer fronts, then sand and finish. Fun, but a major task. With Valchromat, you cut out a piece the size of the cabinet front, slice it up as needed, and that's it. Ready to finish and install.

This new material brings us a little closer to an important goal: finding a way to build a custom kitchen that is not too expensive, but has the same attention to detail and functionality that we can get with more traditional materials.

There are at least two other products that we particularly like for similar reasons. I'll do separate posts on those.

Often it's not cabinetry that runs up the cost, but other factors. I'll do a post on “cost drivers” soon.