Reinventing the 50s

One of the decisions we tackled once our remodeling project became a reality was countertops. Currently we have the ugliness known as tiled countertops -- cream-colored tile countertops whose grout is dissolving around the sink, and whose nooks and crannies harbor bacteria I don't even want to think about. (I tend to just aim the Clorox spray, turn my head, and pray that all the little critters are obliterated upon contact.)

At first, I thought I wanted just a plain old Formica. I even flirted with the possibility of getting one of those fun retro boomerang Formicas, or the virr varr pattern. Then I came to my senses are realized that unless we were planning on staying in this house until we died, it probably wasn't the wisest choice to go all-out retro. Gotta think about resale possibilities, after all.

How many mottled brown varieties of Formica can possibly exist? (A lot, it turns out.) I just sat and stared at all the gobs of samples on chains, realizing that I had absolutely no starting point. I had no colors picked out yet, so I couldn't even narrow down the choices.

By the Formica display, however, was a beautiful, sparkly little gem: a sample of Silestone called Stellar Night. The online sample doesn't do it justice, but here's a shot I took of the sample at home:

Try to ignore the computer glare an think of a -- well, stellar night. Black sky with little white/silver stars. That's what this baby looks like. No matter how many samples I browsed through (Formica, marble, granite, etc), I kept coming back to this. It struck me as being a nice contract between 50s style and modern.

As I was soon to find out, however, having a black countertop severely limited my options for flooring ... especially when I was planning on plunking down a red chrome table in the midst of said flooring.