No engineered stone is approved for UV exposure. It’s not an industry secret at all. None can go outside. Period. If your professionals that you worked with had done their jobs, you’d be an educated consumer and know that it’s not an exclusion just for Cambria. Direct sun from standard new windows shouldn’t pass enough UV to damage your floors, furniture, or e-stone. Standard windows already come with UV blocking properties, so if yours are so old that they don’t have it, you’ve got other issues about UV exposure in your house. Old windows need UV blocking film installed to avoid degradation to all kinds of interior finishes. Not just your e-stone. If it’s a relatively new window, that’s a conversation that you need to have with your window manufacturer. It’s defective. This is Not on Cambria. Or Silestone. Or Pental. Or Zodiaq. Or any e-stone manufacturer. New windows shouldn’t have issues with transmitting enough UV to damage your home.. Poop happens. This isn’t on Cambria. Talk to your window manufacturer.

For neutrals, you could do white tones or marble look-alikes. Or beige or gray. I used griege because my adjacent LR has all warm colors, and white and gray looked awful. We chose quartz because we wanted a little more modern look in a traditional home. We used Caesarstone Buttermilk, but the installers scratched my counters and we replaced them with Pentalquartz Botticino, which is very similar. It looks like very fine grains of sand in a greige base with white squiggles. The overall appearance is like crl's photo. A great warm neutral. Most quartz companies carry warm neutrals with subtle movement. Extreme close-up. The pennies show my seam. While looking for gray tones for a bathroom remodel, we found Caesarstone Bianco Drift. I have a sample here and this photo looks very much like my sample. It's a soft gray and white with some subtle tan swirls. Very pretty next to my cherry kitchen cabs. Look for more photos on the internet. In general I avoid quartz patterns with large chunks of crystals and wildly swirling patterns. I don't think they'll withstand the test of time as well as the quieter patterns. For granite, your best bet is to get to a stone yard and look at all the lighter granites. Quartzite is another choice, which is quite beautiful and durable, if it's a true quartzite and not a marble labelled as quartzite.

Home Depot doesn't charge for Cambria by the slab but by the square foot. They argue that this saves you money, but it occurred to me that such a policy might also lead a fabricator who didn't have immediate access to a matching slab to take a piece from another slab, one he THOUGHT looked the same to him. We all know opinions vary but THIS LOOKS HORRIBLE TO ME FROM THE GET-GO, obvious NOT a match. It's not a match either because it doesn't come from a matching slab OR the rt. hand one is turned UPSIDE DOWN from the other. There is an interesting post on Viatera Soprano which many of us followed: the customer kept staring at the quartz that she had put on the large backsplash. Something was wrong, Yep: When he cut the slabs for the backsplash, the top and bottom of each piece were opposite of one another.

Parisa...Yes! I love them. When we first got them, I searched the best ways to clean the very rare stains (like when rubbing alcohol hit the orange ink on my Hawaiian rolls and dissolved it into liquid orange stains), and didn't see Magic Erasers among the recommendations. I've used rubbing alcohol (good solvent) to clean it, and when necessary, added baking soda or liquid Bar Keepers Friend, whichever was handier. Never had a stain they didn't remove--sharpie, fruit, ORANGE INK! lol No damage to the finish. They look stunning, and have more subtleties than show in the pictures. They are a dream, very easy care and very easy cleaning. I do find that plated food cools fast on them, which is also true of granite and real marble bc of their density (and high specific heat capacity, for the science nerds, haha). I'm so glad I didn't go for granite a few years ago and be stuck with the looks that I'm now tired of. Marble is not only timeless, but always gorgeous. We get wowed compliments on it, too.