Concrete worktop finishes: cream or salt and pepper

We cast face down, against a smooth mould. The finest part of the mix, the cement paste, settles against that face and sets as a thin, dense skin.

A cream finish keeps that skin. We demould, clean and seal it with SureCrete XS-327. Nothing is ground away.

You get the colour at full strength and a surface as flat as the mould it came off.

We take that skin off with diamond pads, working up through the grits to 800. It opens the surface just far enough to show the fine sand in the mix.

The sand reads as a soft speckle, which is where the name comes from. Deep colours sit a shade lighter and pale ones a shade darker, because the sand has a colour of its own. Either way it looks more like stone. The surface is smooth and honed, with a slight sheen. Then it's sealed exactly as the cream is.

Pigment colours the cement paste. It doesn't colour the sand. The skin is almost all paste, so it carries the colour at full depth. Hone through it and part of what you see is sand.

We've written up why the colour changes in the Journal.

Salt and pepper. Cream is a thin skin, and a deep scratch or a hard knock can go through it to the sand below. That shows as a lighter mark.

Salt and pepper already shows its sand, so everyday wear blends in. Both are sealed the same way and cared for the same way: see looking after your worktop.

For a kitchen that gets cooked in hard, salt and pepper. It's the more forgiving of the two.

If colour and flatness are the whole point, and the kitchen is calm, go cream. Nothing shows a colour better.

It will, because the sample is made the way your worktop is. Same mix, same finish, same XS-327 seal. Every sample goes out in both finishes, labelled, so you choose from the real thing and not a photo.

We cast by hand, so no two pours are identical. Your worktop will sit close to your sample, the way two pieces of the same stone do.