“Yeah, I like the granite countertop!”
Wait a second.
No, no, no, no... listen, listen.
Your granite countertop’s: beautiful.
My counters are awful.
But the hype is a little over the top.
"I love this granite countertop. I like it, I like it very much.”
That’s good you like it.
But if you watch these house hunting shows, it's like
granite countertop hunting, maybe with a house attached.
"Granite is the cherry on top of the sundae when it comes to your kitchen.”
Isn’t this all a bit much?
When Consumer Reports looked at countertops,
they noted that while granite is great for heat and scratches,
it can chip,
and it needs periodic resealing.
Quartz can be similarly priced and is “more durable and requires less maintenance.”
Our dream kitchens used to look like this.
So how did we get to:
“To be able to have granite countertops is just awesome.”
“Glad we could help you with a life goal.”
Granite countertops are about hype, not quality alone.
And that hype says something
about how trends trickle down from the elite to everybody else.
This is a grainy 1955 video where a woman brags about her awesome kitchen.
"This whole kitchen was designed for efficiency and convenience.”
She shows off hot new countertops that definitely weren’t granite.
“No danger with Formica, won’t ever stain.”
Formica was the flashiest brand of laminate that kept counters stain and scratch free.
The technology flourished in the 50's, and it was part of a national trend.
After World War II, there was a sustained housing boom.
Laminate counters were in, and they went in all those new houses.
“Housing, for the seventh straight year, the industry has topped one million starts.”
Prominent companies like the one that made Youngstown Kitchens
benefitted from the boom.
After supplying steel for military orders during World War II,
they went on to sell all-steel kitchen cabinets
with laminate tops that fit right in.
These installed kitchens set a standard across all the new homes in America.
And it was easy to put in countertops, like “Cusheen,”
a weird type of vinyl,
linoleum,
and sweet, sweet laminated edge grain maple.
These laminates were a luxury compared to wood,
but they were more affordable
thanks to a booming industry and lots of construction.
And manufacturers were darn proud of their steel kitchens,
as this Youngstown choir sings.
Laminates showed up in millions of homes.
So how did we go from, “No danger with Formica...” to
“Oh my god the color... the iridescence is so sparkly ”
The answer is surprisingly similar To what helped laminates take over in the 1950's.
Emerson Schwartzkopf at Stone Update put together this data on Worked granite imports from 1996 to 2016.
“Worked granite” basically means granite that’s ready to be cut into gorgeous countertops.
1996 shows where granite was, with a relatively low 206,000 metric tons imported to the US.
It was elite.
So what made it ten times more popular a decade later?
Granite had cred because it was rare.
In 1987, the LA Times said it could get you “status points.”
So, in the 2000's, a few things had to happen to make the elite material accessible to the middle class.
You might think of granite as Italian,
“You know there’s actually one mountain less in Italy because of all this, hahaha.”
But these days, it’s often Brazilian.
Look at 2014, for example.
Brazil was 54% of US imports.
Italy was just 6%.
That big shift to a worldwide supply of granite made it more accessible.
Granite became easier to mine and ship.
New technological advances,
like computer controlled cutting,
made it easier to cut all that granite locally.
Finally, look at when that chart peaks.
2006.
The granite bubble and housing bubble came at the same time.
Just as laminates rode technological and construction booms in the 50's,
granite rode the similar waves in the 2000's.
Granite was good,
but its timing made it overrated.
and that might be why we’re starting to correct.
The end of that chart shows a dip in granite.
That’s for a lot of reasons, some of which are bigger than interior design trends.
But if you watch house hunting shows you’ll see there are other materials catching on.
“My wish list would include quartz countertops..”
That might be the reason we keep searching for it.
“Our homes acquire new grace, new glamour, new accommodations,
expressing not only the American love of beauty,
but also the basic freedom of the American people,
which is the freedom of individual choice.”
There are so many amazing laminate patterns from the 1950's.
I have to point out one,
and that is the Formica boomerang.
You'll never guess why it's called that.
It’s called … it looks like a boomerang.