Businesses
Commercial stone for restaurants, spas and offices
Bar tops, reception desks and shop counters, cut in stone for rooms the public uses and built to be looked at and wiped down.
Chapter 01
What a counter in a business is up against
A kitchen counter serves one household. A counter in a business serves everyone who walks in, and it is cleaned with commercial products that no one would keep under a home sink.
A bar top takes glassware set down hard, spilled citrus and spirits, and a long row of elbows every evening. A reception desk wears differently: keys, bags, coffee cups and a clipboard dragged across the front. One is a working surface. The other is the first thing a visitor sees, and it is judged from standing height as much as it is judged for wear.
Front of a reception desk in bookmatched green stone
How a commercial piece is built
Commercial runs are long. A bar top can run past the length of a single slab, so it has to be joined, and the joint has to land where the pattern hides it and where no one leans or works.
A reception desk is usually about its front. Bookmatching lays two consecutive slices of the same block side by side like an open book, so the veining mirrors across the centre line. A mitred apron folds the edge down at forty-five degrees so the stone reads as a solid block, with no visible thickness at the corner.
A commercial install also has to fit around the other trades in the room. Electricians, plumbers and painters share the space, and stone that arrives before the room is ready has nowhere to go. That is a general fact of fit-outs, and it is why the measure and the sequence are worth talking through early.
Chapter 03
Choosing a stone for a room the public uses
Choose density for a bar. Granite and quartzite are hard and take glassware well, and quartz gives an even pattern along a long run. Marble is lovely behind a bar and unforgiving on top of one, because the acid in citrus and wine etches a polished surface.
Choose presence for a desk front. A bookmatched slab in a strong stone, like the green stone on the desk front above, does its work from across the room, and a front sees less abuse than a working top. Finish matters too. Under overhead lighting a polished surface throws reflections and shows every fingerprint, while a honed one stays quiet.
Bring the room to the conversation: the light, the cleaning products and the people who will lean on it. A spa vanity, a restaurant bar and a lobby desk each get a different answer to the same question, and the six stones can be seen and handled at the showroom in Springdale.
Their own description of the work: “homes, restaurants, spas, high-end kitchens, and much much more.”
On the job
A long bar top being set
Two installers set a long striped bar top. The cutting and edging behind a piece like this are on our fabrication and installation page, and the kitchens we build for homes are on the residential page.