We have had a tough time deciding on granite for our kitchen, so I was hoping that we might find some good input here.

Our kitchen is fairly small, and we are painting our engineered maple cabinets white (not cream). Our appliances are stainless, and our cabinet hardware will match. We are replacing our composite granite (dark gray) sink with an undermount square (very industrial looking) deep stainless sink and high faucet. Our kitchen gets a lot of direct sunlight, and we have small children.. so we would like to avoid darker granite.

We would really prefer a lighter granite without any strong gold/brown tones, which is apparently difficult to find. While I liked Bianco Romano online, the slabs that I was able to find are not to my liking at all. In fact, mostly everything is too brown or gold or has too much dramatic veining for our taste and small space (approx 43 sq ft of counter space).

I am supposed to go view some slabs of Giallo Ornamentale tomorrow (they only had a small remnant of a slab last week). But we came across two slabs last week that we really liked. One was African Beige (which we really like, but aren't sold on for our space) and the other is Giallo Farfalla Leather, shown here (this slab actually comes from the same lot as ours): http://www.marvamarble.com/BATIMAGE/D00053..jpg

We have never heard of a leather finish, but it feels incredible.. so warm/smooth to the touch - you just want to keep touching it. As far as I understand, it's 'like' a honed finish except that it comes out of the quarry that way.. the fabricator can't make a slab 'leathered'. It seems like it would give our kitchen a more 'upscale' feel than just your standard polished granite. It has mostly gray/white tones, so it seems like it would work well with white cabinets and lots of stainless (our walls are recently painted a very pretty gray blue). It would also set us over about $1k what we wanted to spend, which is why we're debating it.

My main concern is that we will most likely be selling our home in a few years (we are military) and while we prefer modern style, we are wondering if buyers would question this 'leather finish' and why we didn't choose a polished finish instead.. or even think it looks 'fake'. Our next concern is that it will be washed away with white cabinets, though we could do something more dramatic in the backsplash (we're undecided, but most likely some kind of marble or glass backsplash) to make it pop a little more.

So, that all being said.. opinions?

:O)