Do you have a good amount of light in your kitchen? What is your hardware? Are you wanting to lean more gray or more cream/caramel?

All three choices are very nice. Have you considered actual soapstone?

I personally am wary of polished black granite only because I frequent a house with polished black - but I think it's something like uba tuba. Anyway, it always looks dusty to me.

I would also like to know the answer to the question regarding sealed, honed black as well.

Lastly, I don't think a lighter/all white kitchen is boring at all.

I did polished, as I like to wipe off and be done.

Look at leathered or antiqued instead. All of the beauty of the polished but more matte. And none of the issues with it grabbing and holding on to oils like with honed. The third choice is kinda eh, just there. If you can't find the leathered, keep looking. Maybe a quartz in a deep gray.

What about leathered? (Mine was call leathered antique brown granite), but I think it might be the same as what stone yard people call "antiqued." I love it. It's soft to the touch and in certain lights it shows beautiful and interesting details because of the differing layers of texture. It seems matte at first, but has a little more somethin' somethin' to it...but definately not shiny.

We LOVE our leathered granite. Mostly matte in look, easy to clean so far, has some lovely texture...it's almost "soft" to the touch...for some reason it doesn't feel as "hard" as shiny granite does.

Haha...I just read what strayer said about it being soft to the touch...that's great that someone else is saying that too.

Another vote here for leathered granite--see if you can get a sample and take it home and test it. When I compared it to a sample of the honed granite, it won, easily. I loved both the warmth and the fact that it doesn't show oil stains. Good luck!

For everyone with leathered-- did you pick a stone that they already were selling leathered, or did you pick a stone and then decide to have it leathered or antiqued? If the latter, did the yard leather a sample for you?

Lesmobo- the kitchen has a good number of windows, but is north facing, so though it gets light it is weak light. It's also a small galley. That said, I don't think the black would overwhelm. We are waiting to choose hardware until we pick the countertop. As for considering soapstone, it would be my number one choice, but it is a lot more expensive than the black mist granite (close to double the cost) and we may move in as soon as five years, so we are worried about its resale value. If we ever get into a home that we know will be our forever home, we will be getting soapstone, no question. I still would love to spring for it, resale be damned, I just don't know where else I could cut from my budget in order to make up that cost.

ktj459 - we were fortunate that we saw ours leathered as it was at the fabricator's that way. We went with a lighter granite, and it was actually the only light granite that we've seen that has been leathered...all the rest were dark. Until we saw our slabs, I thought that for whatever reason, they only did dark slabs in a leathered finish (don't know why I assumed that other than never seeing a light leathered one before)

To be honest, when it was vertical, I didn't see as much of the detail of the leathering as now when it's installed. Our stone has a fair amount of mica in it and those are mostly the areas where it has the "indents" and those are shiny, so we have both the textural aspects as well as where it shows up shiny.

Had we been going with a dark granite, we saw and loved Comsus/Astrix in a leathered finish.

Mine was already leathered when I found it at the stoneyard. So I got to feel the texture of it. I didn't discover all the nice details of how the light reflects until it was installed. When the fabricator prepared it for the kitchen, they explained to me that they have to polish the edge and the re-leather the edge to match the rest of the stone. That worked out fine, it looks good.

Thank you for this thread! I am considering leathering a piece of scrap sandstone that has fossils in it. There is no sample though.. I could probably ask the yard to do that but I'm not sure how necessary the extra step is. OTOH I'm not exactly certain what it might look like leathered. Can anyone help?

From what I'm reading in archives and here, it sounds to me as if the leathering will bring out textures such as the fossils. That's probably a great idea, except I worry it's a pain to clean. Not that this will be in a terribly cleaning-intensive location. It's a bathroom that functions as a powder room. So people will be using the sink fairly frequently, just not leaving wine stains and the like. But do you think water splashes would pool in indents and maybe with time gunk those indents up? Because I'm guessing there's not going to be a whole lot of wiping-down going on....

Can anyone hazard a guess as to how polished vs leathered would look in this instance? I wish I had a picture of the stone but I forgot to snap one. Dumb! If the yard sends one I'll post it.

Thanks, all!

We have polished black pearl.....it is a maintenance nightmare! Kind of like a black car only looks great right after it's cleaned. I have 5 kids, big mistake on our part (the polished black pearl, not the kids! Lol!) Anyone know if you can get it leathered in place or after the fact??? I definitely wished we'd gone with that finish!!

We have polished black pearl.....it is a maintenance nightmare! Kind of like a black car only looks great right after it's cleaned. I have 5 kids, big mistake on our part (the polished black pearl, not the kids! Lol!) Anyone know if you can get it leathered in place or after the fact??? I definitely wished we'd gone with that finish!!

We have polished black pearl.....it is a maintenance nightmare! Kind of like a black car only looks great right after it's cleaned. I have 5 kids, big mistake on our part (the polished black pearl, not the kids! Lol!) Anyone know if you can get it leathered in place or after the fact??? I definitely wished we'd gone with that finish!!