Near Madurai, Tamil Natu. January 2015
Part of any decent kitchen or bath renovation is a good countertop. Our "Interior Architect" on the Milford Museum House project (in case you don't know, an interior architect is a more expensive interior designer - something we found out after spending a lot of money) recommended that we use "All Granite and Marble Corp." of Ridgefield Park, NJ. They were an extremely professional group of Polish immigrants who spun their company into something big and profitable during the renovation boom before the housing market crash of 2008. I liked the company and the staff, but I especially loved going to their warehouse to look at the huge polished slabs of stone. I never realized how beautiful granite could be! Some of the glassy smooth pieces looked like modern art and it seemed almost a shame to cut them into bathroom or kitchen surfaces.
What I noticed in walking through "the yard" was that most of the granite came from either India or Brazil. I filed that away in my mind.
Many years later cruising around the Tamilian outback with MP on the back of his motorcycle (Note: Tamil Nadu is virtually EMPTY compared to North India, so riding around on a motorcycle in the countryside is beautifully tranquil), we started passing all these granite quarries. I suddenly remembered "All Granite and Marble Corp." from the renovation of the Museum House. I was in India, perhaps near the very place that our kitchen countertop hailed from! There were huge blocks of granite everywhere just waiting to be transported. Some were sliced into slabs, but most were huge cubes which I assumed would be laser cut on arrival to their destinations.
The countryside did not support agriculture there. The land was most used for grazing being all scrub brush with these huge boulders and stone outcrops - literally, the motherload of granite which would be "harvested" to garnish over-the-top kitchen and bathroom renovations in North American homes. MP obligingly stopped so I could drink it all in, but he didn't get the significance. Similar to when I passed through Carrara, Italy, I felt a bit awe struck. "So this is the place..."
In fact, that area had so much granite (and the devices for cutting it up) that granite became quite "cheap". How did I know? Many of the nearby livestock enclosures were made using fence posts of GRANITE! Talk about a fence that would never need to be repaired.... I thought of all those Americans who bragged about granite counter tops when in Tamil Nadu they could roll their eyes and say "granite? we use it for fence posts, darling".
I suppose by wandering the globe long enough, we finally find the source of most things.
Indian granite, how about that? And I thought countertops came from a yard along the Hackensack River in Jersey!
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