Hi- We love our Cambria Somerset and have not had any problems of any kind with it. No scratches, chipping, dings, huge resin blobs.... It is absolutely beautiful and was the best choice for us because of it's ease of care, resiliency and the Somerset was the perfect compliment to the sandstone wall we have on one side of the kitchen. Good luck!

We did this in a showroom, on an island that we used to set up buffets. Yes, people snagged their fuzzy sweater type clothes on it, and yes, it was difficult to clean. Requires a scrub brush, lots of towels, and a directed spray of clean water to rinse. Thus the towels, to keep the water off of the cabinets. The great chocolate syrup spill during our ice cream sundae gathering was a pain to get it looking right again.

It looks like marble, but more than likely it is quartzite (similar to marble.) Especially since it is stored outside. Quartz is not good out in the elements. Be careful if you are choosing it for your kitchen. Quartzite and marble will scratch and etch. Unless you are not much of a cook and the kitchen is more ornamental, I would choose quartz or granite.

Great questions! All marbles are made of the same minerals: calcite and/or dolomite, with minor amounts of other minerals that give it color and character. The minerals in a rock determine it's hardness, and each mineral has a characteristic hardness on Mohs scale. Calcite has a hardness of 3, dolomite is 3.5. So by definition, anything that's marble has a hardness of 3 to 3.5. Porosity is an entirely different thing. Porosity is a consequence of how the minerals are arranged. So two different marbles can be made out of the same mineral, but in one case the minerals have void spaces in between them, and in another case it's tightly crystallized together. In that example, both marbles have the same hardness (3 to 3.5) but they'd have different porosities. Hope that clarifies! And I love your screen name! :)