The way we chose our countertop about 8 years ago was a bit backward, but I guess was meant to be. DH and I were in a kitchen showroom to look at cabinetry, not even ready for countertops yet. I was a little fearful of choosing counters because I was sure it would take awhile to find something we both liked alot. Walking through this showroom we both stopped dead in our tracks at a display and without even speaking, we knew we had just found our countertop. It was Silestone and we thought it looked perfect for our kitchen. I have never regretted that choice and love it to this day. What's funny about it though, is when I look at that 2x2 sample (I carried that around for months shopping) I think it looks hideous and from that, we NEVER would have chosen it. It was the full effect that blew us away. Guess it's the same for me with a small paint chip sample. I can never visualize a whole wall of it realistically. I really need to see more. Now I am so glad we visited that showroom when we did. Saved me alot of time and indecision!

@enright5 - I know this is a few months after your initial posts, but I came across your posts while I was looking for photos of real life installations of Lyra and Lagoon Silestone. I can total relate to the original post. I love marble too and the look it provides, but it is not a good fit for my family. Knowing this I am not looking to trick people into thinking I have marble - just LOVE the general look and feel. SO what did you finally decide on?

I like the busier one, but these are SUCH small samples. If there is one lesson I have learned, and cannot emphasize enough, is that you MUST GO SEE THE SLABS. Really. I know you have seen one of them, although even that marble may be entirely different if you go back to the granite yard and look at another slab of that same marble. You may find a slab of the busier one which isn't so busy over the entire slab, or a slab of the quieter one that may have large veins in it that aren't in the sample. So don't make a choice until you see several slabs of these marbles, and then just choose by which slab you like. BTW, don't forget to bring your cabinet samples and soapstone samples to the granite yard with you.

Here are a some pics and my dilemma. Keep in mind this is my old fridge...new one comes today! Here is how we ended up with this: I have never had an enclosed fridge so didn't think about the peninsula dying into panels or how deep panels were going to be. I "semi" designed the new footprint and took it to Lowe's where the KD took over. (yes---I know......) Bought Schuler plywood with maple fronts cabinets. Although the kitchen designer had the model number of the fridge we were buying, which is a full-size, she designed the kitchen with 24" deep panels. She knew I was trying to have the look of an enclosed fridge. Being that I've never had an enclosed fridge, it was something I just didn't think of until the install started. Evidently she put a counter-depth in the design program because the elevation sketches she gave me showed an enclosed fridge. "Luckily" the panels actually came in wrong and were cut at only 23" for some strange reason and the installer caught it right away when looking over everything. Otherwise he probably would have installed them and I would be stuck. So called Lowe's to reorder the panels and somehow in all this it suddenly dawned on me that a full size fridge was going to be deeper and require deeper panels. I thought "no problem! Yay I can order them at 30!" By this time the KD had quit her job due to the pandemic. The other KD didn't know what was going on so we called in the Schuler rep. She was the one who immediately told me that those 30" panels would be sticking out in front of the peninsula. She asked if we could move the peninsula forward since the other side is an overhang for seating, but we couldn't since it would bottleneck the entrance into the kitchen down to under 36" and getting rid of an existing bottleneck was one of the reasons for the re-design to start with. So we had a dilemma. We cannot go down to a counter depth fridge which was the other option. What I decided was to split the difference and order 27" refrigerator panels. The fridge without doors is 29.5" so I will have about 3" of the side of the fridge sticking out which I don't like, but while I want my kitchen to look beautiful, I value the functionality too. The old fridge that you see in the pic sticks out a total of 32" The new fridge will stick out 34 with doors but without handles (4.5" of that is doors that would stick out anyway) Here's the really complicated part....we will be installing decorative panels on the end of the fridge as we have them on all the cabinets. This is how you enter the kitchen and I don't want that big blank space there next to the peninsula. The panels should be installed with just 1/4" reveal. I posted a photo below of how the panels look that are already installed on the side of the pantry that adjoins to a 17" high window seat. Luckily those face the opposite way from the fridge panels so you will never see both at the same time. I also posted photos of us holding up panels on the side of the fridge (they are NOT the right size panels...we have to order those still---we just used these to look at the right edge as to how wide to make the panels.) Also keep in mind we can remove the quartz backsplash piece if that would look better. That was not originally planned...the panels were going to sit directly on top of the countertop. So do we order the panels with just the 1/4" reveal to match the panels in the rest of the kitchen? Or, as the Schuler rep recommended, order the panels so they are the same width with the countertop, leaving about 1 3/4" reveal on the right side, but then your eye follows the countertop all the way up. I asked the countertop templater guy if I should just lengthen the overhang on the kitchen side of the peninsula to 2.5" to bring it out to within 1/4" of the fridge panel but he said no....I'm now thinking I should have insisted on it. Especially since we have full overlay cabinets that already make the overlay look very small since the 1.5" planned overhang is measured from the box, not the front of the drawers. Note how small the overhang looks to the drawers. And then of course, they had templated for a 1.5" overhang and I only got 1.25" UGH! Every quarter inch there would have made the reveal on the side of the fridge less. Suggestions appreciated! I'm hoping that I will eventually make peace in my mind with this issue and won't notice it but it is driving me crazy right now. I think of all the things that screwed up just because of this one error by the KD that I didn't catch and I am beating myself up for it!