Granite has always carried a reputation as a classic beauty. But more recently, it has become a booming business in home decor.
"Granite is really hot," said Stephen Stran, owner of Harford Radon & Real Estate Repair Inc., who has been remodeling homes in Maryland for 25 years. "Recently, I've seen it used not only for countertops but also for custom applications like stair treads and borders around flooring. Ten years ago, I didn't see any of this happening."
A recent survey of design trends by the New Jersey-based National Kitchen and Bath Association reports that 37 percent of homeowners who remodeled last year chose granite for their countertops. That was a 14 percent increase from 1995 and the No. 1 choice for counter- tops.
Minnesota-based Cold Spring Granite, one of the largest suppliers of the stone in North America, boasted its highest granite countertop sales ever last year.
Why the sudden interest in a stone as old as Earth? The answer is availability, according to those who work with granite. Because of improved quarrying techniques, the price of granite has dropped as much as 40 percent during the past five years.
"At one time it was a luxury item," said Delbert Adams, president of Ilex Construction and Development in Maryland and Virginia. "But recently, because of new quarrying technology and lower prices, it's become available to all ranges of homeowners."
Quarrying granite used to be a cumbersome process that required drills and explosives. Today, most of the world's quarries - concentrated mainly in China, India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Canada and in New Hampshire and South Dakota - use long loops of steel cables impregnated with diamonds (the Earth's hardest stone) to slice easily through sections of granite and extract them from the quarry beds. This method has increased the supply and lowered the costs.
Like lava, granite is an igneous rock that forms deep underground, slowly cooling and crystallizing. It is made up predominantly of three minerals - quartz, feldspar and mica. Because each granite deposit contains varying proportions of these minerals, every slab of the stone looks different. For many homeowners, this is granite's greatest draw. Unlike synthetic materials such as Corian and Formica, the colors and textures of granite change every few feet, giving it a unique appearance that some call artistic - for a slab of stone.
