I Splurged on This Gorgeous Countertop Trend — and Wish Someone Had Warned Me About This Detail Before

I’m a sucker for a good stone. Beautifully polished and cut rocks simply rock, and nowhere better than in a kitchen. When you have big slabs of various colors, peppered with sparkly bits, reflecting light, showing fluid movement in its multidimensional lines, it draws the eye and elevates and enlivens everything around it. And that’s why a gorgeous kitchen countertop is always worth it. 

Or at least, that’s how I felt when I splurged on my shimmering, uniquely aqua, sand, and opalline oyster Fantasy Brown quartzite counters. I fell in love with the type of stone first, becoming obsessed with the color and how its silver and ocean green tones would complement my shattered glass-effect backsplash. My kitchen was small, and I wasn’t replacing my cabinets, so why not treat myself? 

But that kind of thinking can get you into trouble. And by you, I mean me, as I started seeing photos of a very dramatic countertop effect in kitchen design showrooms, magazines, and then plastered all over my social media. I fell hard for the waterfall edge — one of the year’s hottest kitchen island trends.

Waterfall countertops are immediately identifiable and absolutely unforgettable. They look exactly as they sound: a large swath of stone covering a kitchen peninsula or island shape that suddenly ends with a seamless shift into a sharp 90-degree drop that then meets flush with the floor.

It is beauty; it is grace. It’s real, and it’s spectacular. And in my home, it’s an incredible, scene-stealing detail that turned my small townhouse kitchen into an instant showstopper, eliciting oohs and ahhs the minute it comes into a first-time guest’s view.

Difficult to execute and requiring a significant amount of extra unblemished stone, it’s an expensive way to put an exclamation point on your kitchen design. Ideally, you want to buy a big enough slab that the veins of the countertop stone continue vertically down the side, matchy-matchy and aligned like so many other luxury products. But that can mean buying more countertop than you actually need, and having to search wider and harder for the right set of slabs. For me, it meant having to go with a leathered finish instead of the smooth, shiny traditional finish I’d originally wanted. 

Making it even pricier is that not every granite fabricator is willing or able to execute this effect. Installation requires a perfectly precise mitered edge, which is a sharp angle cut that risks chipping the fine-cut corner or cracking a seam — even after installation and use. This additional labor ended up costing me nearly $1,000 more.

So, affordable? Err, not really. But gorgeous? Absolutely. It was this dazzling drama that blinded me to some of the more impractical points of a waterfall edge counter. But for a few minutes of every day, I fall out of my hypnosis and recognize the frustration of its cons. 

Aside from cost, the biggest issue is that it has no lip. Because it’s a seamless drop, anything you brush or wipe off this counter edge falls straight to the floor and wedges into the tiny crack where the vertical panel meets the floor. Without an overlapping lip that allows you to place your hand or dustpan beneath to catch crumbs, and no way to create a perfect flush with either, I find myself having to go at its base with a hand-vac quite often. 

The side panel also means having an extra surface to clean, treat, and polish. This maintenance is important since it’s vulnerable to dings and dulling, which makes it particularly unsuitable for homes with small children or pets.

And just because the fabricator was able to cut the waterfall edge and fuse it together perfectly doesn’t mean the risk of cracking the edge is over. It remains delicate for its lifetime since it’s been weakened due to its cut. My greatest fear is banging something against it accidentally and putting a dent where the seams meet.

Finally, if visual perfection is critical, blemishes stand out more. Because quartzite is natural and therefore organically varies, the fabricator has to make some tough decisions on where to cut to keep the veins continuous. Unfortunately for me, one dark spot occurs on the outside corner, which makes it look forever stained or damaged. 

However, all of those are momentary annoyances. The color and the effect do bring me joy every time I walk into my kitchen, and generally, except for the few minutes I spend cleaning, I don’t regret spending considerably more to have such a statement feature in my home.