Granite becomes the kitchen-counter favorite

WASHINGTON — A couple walks into a house, in any city, on any HGTV show.

This house has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, the real-estate agent tells them. It has a fenced-in back yard, lots of light, a good school district, a new furnace. It comes with a unicorn. This house — she thinks they're ready to hear this news — this house will make them lose 15 pounds from their thighs.

Does it have granite countertops? the husband asks.

No.

Well, then ...

"What's interesting is how granite has quickly become the one and only material, across the country and across all price points," says Ron Cathell, a real-estate agent in Northern Virginia. It used to be a high-end thing, back in the 1990s when these countertops began making appearances. It was aspirational.

"Then, 12 years ago, the first sort of moderately priced homes started using it. Now, every home has to have granite if you want to sell it. Not just sell it, but rent it. It's become such a thing. It's almost — " he searches for the right metaphor. "It's almost like trying to sell a house without a toilet."

As the price has gone down, the popularity has gone up; just look at the graph provided by StoneUpdate.com, a website dedicated to the natural-stone industry. In 2000, 895,000 metric tons of granite slabs were imported to the United States. In 2011, that number was 1.43 million — and that's down from a high of 2.64 million a few years ago.

The recession slowed granite sales — even cheap granite, which can be bought for as low as about $30 a square foot. Less cheap can go for $80, or however much you're willing to spend, really. The backsplash is the limit.

Let's get deeper. Let's get more psychological.

Let's go to Counter Intelligence, a Maryland granite dealer whose 186 employees organize about 40 countertop installations a day. They pride themselves on quick turnaround: two days from order to installation. They strive for low price points — a basic order could cost about $3,000. A man could buy his wife nice jewelry for $3,000. Counter Intelligence wants to persuade this man to buy a countertop instead.

Richard Trimber is the president and chief operating officer of Counter Intelligence. Trimber has spent a lot of time thinking about countertops.

He knows, for example, that his average countertop installation is usually between 40 and 43 square feet, depending on how old the house is. He has read "Freakonomics." He has read "The Culture Code." Trimber knows that when people buy countertops, they are not really buying countertops.

"Our product is purely emotional," he says, back in his office at his desk, which is made of granite. "Nobody needs a new countertop." What the granite does, he says, is make a statement about who you are and where you are in life.

It says: I am not living in a group house in the city anymore. It says: I am not holing up in my parents' basement. It says: I will throw parties in my open-floor-plan great room, refilling the hummus for the kitchen island while chatting with my guests. I will buy the hummus from Trader Joe's.

Another thing. "Your stone," Trimber says, "is the only stone in existence."

Recently, the Dulles Expo and Conference Center held a home and renovation expo. Customers streamed in from around the Greater Washington, D.C., area. In the back, every hour on the hour, a woman wrapped in what looked like papier-mâché came out and became the "Living Fountain" display, with water shooting out of her fingertips.

Around this spectacle, people mingled. A young couple, holding hands, bought cinnamon almonds and looked at starter granite. An older couple bickered about whether they were buying countertops or looking at hot tubs. The woman wanted the counter. The woman won.

"What do you call this?" The man asked, running his hands over a granite tile at a dealer's booth. "Carpe diem, huh?"

Seize it. Seize the countertop.

Bring it home and install it. Styles may fade, but it would take eons and eons for the granite to crumble, returning to the elements from whence it came. Have something permanent. Something dependable. A big, weighty slab of the American dream.

The rest is here:
Granite becomes the kitchen-counter favorite