A good friend of ours has done many concrete countertops and they look amazing. We seriously considered it for our remodel. The staining/etching is what turned us off. To be perfectly frank I'm a slob in the kitchen. A countertop that would be damaged by red wine or lemon left on it overnight is just not feasible. Instead we went with soapstone. If it can hold up to legions of teenage chemistry students I feel it can hold up to me. :D If you do decide to go with concrete have you seen the books by Fu-Tung Cheng? They're excellent. Soapstone can be a lot more affordable as a DIY project. The quarry we bought from has DIY kits for about $25/sq ft or you could make it even cheaper by using tiles. Soapstone seams incredibly well.

Off topic perhaps but I thought I'd add...same concept applies to passive solar installations. There needs to be thermal mass--often rock, concrete, or water barrels. They inhale warmth during sunny part of day and exhale warmth later. The swing from hot to cool is very dramatic. We have a "solar porch" along one wall of our house. The floor is poured gypcrete (concrete product used in hotels, apartments, etc for dense floor) with dark-colored tile above that. During sunny winter days we open curtains and let sun heat be absorbed by the floor. The floor is a heat sink. It warms up. By mid-afternoon it might be downright barefootworthy in February. Before sundown we need to close the curtains. Late afternoon and into the evening, this floor slowly cools, releasing the heat into the porch and adjacent space which is at that time cooler than the floor. Once the air temp is cool enough, the thermostat kicks in the primary heating system. This might be well into the evening, depending on the weather outside. All night long, the temp of the porch floor continues to descend to the temp of the room air--say 62 degrees--and in morning the porch floor is definitely not barefootworthy. I don't like being in that room during winter if the floor has not been warmed by the passive solar gain. On cloudy winter days I go elsewhere and the curtains are left closed. The cold floor fights me for first dibs at the warmth being sent into it through the heat registers and the floor wins. Or I get a blanket for my lap and my warm socks and a rug for my feet. We have a wood stove in the same general part of the house. If that gets to be too hot for comfort, we open doors to the porch so the mass in porch floor grabs that heat and the adjacent room cools down. We have ductwork throughout the house so we can run the furnace fan to spread out the heat. We also have two ceiling fans which help spread out the porch heat. It's never ideal, but we've had the passive solar porch since we built it with incentives from fed gov't under Carter and it's made the house less expensive to heat and the porch allowed us to have wonderful views from windows that would not have been permitted by code without the thermal curtain. ___ I'd be happier if the heating of a rock countertop were also doing something more useful: warming the room as well, cooking a crockpot-like meal, or the like. Otherwise it's another stupid American waste of hydrocarbons.

Love love love this topic. Your kitchens are amazing. Looking for pics of stainless; particularly of stainless with white cabinets and beadboard backsplash... Have you ever seen this combo? Any ideas would be awesome. Again truly amazing kitchens!!

Every choice has pluses and minuses, in the end you have to choose which plus and which minus matters the most to you and/or which have an easy fix (like using a cutting board under the crockpot; at work we have an extra piece under the big coffeemaker). budget mattered a lot to me (and I hated formica) so, I ended up with a lesser expensive granite and am very happy, no sealing or extra work for the stone I chose. I had formica previously which looked like h#*! from the day I moved in and didn't get better (except that I could use bleach to remove stains) so those of you whose formica looks like new after 30 years must be taking appropriate care -- using cutting boards (mine had little cuts all over) and so forth -- where my previous owners did not. But, I read that formica now is much better quality than what was installed 30 or 40 years ago. I looked at Burled Beach and liked it. It looked a warm sand-ish color on my samples in my house, but I saw a demo kitchen of it at a big box store and it was a warm greenish tone (I still liked it) under their fluorescent lights. You always have to ability to STOP and make changes unless the cabinets are all already made. If he is just now starting it might not be too late -- call him now! PS do you have an IKEA near to you? Most counter materials are less expensive there.