Sometimes, there doesn’t seem to be even the tiniest Venn-diagram intersection between what you want, and what’s in fashion, when you are planning a renovation. Nowhere was that more true on our Renovation Road than in kitchen countertops.

I’d walk into a showroom and pace through all the displays, which were endless variations on whites, greys, beiges, with perhaps a few dramatic black or oxblood red flashes. Real marble and stone and even stainless steel look good, in the right place. Our simple 19th-century-farmhouse-meets-mid-century-modern was not that place.

I do like wood countertops and we ordered a cherrywood butcher block for the kitchen island to complement the warm teak wood pieces. But I had a bad experience with wood countertop abutting the sink in my second house: It got blackened/rotty and was hard to keep clean. The Canadian Butcher Blook Company, an Ontario company from whom we ordered the butcher block, also made countertops and they were adamant that new techniques prevented such rotting. However, I wanted something more durable that also added a bit of colour to the L shape of countertops lining the kitchen perimeter.

The countertop at our Toronto apartment kitchen was a pale blue-grey laminate, matching the tone of the glass subway tiles on the backsplash. This surfacing was no longer in stock at IKEA so I started poking around the Formica website, the company whose laminate defined the 1950s’ style era. I tried out different phrases and search terms to pick up something in that colour family and hit the jackpot when I typed in “sea glass”.

There she was! My countertop! Delightful speckles of the signature teal, some other bits of green, grey and a warm orangey-pinkish fleck on white. I ordered a sample, which was even better than its online photo representation.

This also wasn’t the relatively thin laminate. It was made from another Formica product called “Everform Solid Surface.”

I carried my little square sample everywhere as we started putting together the renovation plan. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” was the common reaction from people working in home supply stores, followed by, “Omigod, I love this!”

We took a break from renovation thinking for a drive-trip vacation in Eastern Ontario in August 2022 that included a day at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. As we toured the exhibition hall on the Second World War, one of the last pieces was a typical kitchen from the kind of houses rapidly built in the late 1940s and early 1950s to accommodate returning service men as they began family lives.

My countertop! Or at least, a similar pattern. When we got home, I went through old family photos to see if maybe this was the counter used in my childhood home, built by my father, a war veteran, in 1956.

I do remember there were pink-painted cabinets (my mother loved pink) and I can find only two pictures that show glimpses of that kitchen when I was a toddler. There is a woodgrain-pattern laminate-topped kitchen table, grey patterned wallpaper, the pink cabinets, grey square backsplash tiles and … well, it’s a light, maybe pale grey, countertop? Maybe it had pretty speckles? My parents are no longer with us to confirm.

My 2023 speckled material may look like laminate, but it’s an entirely different creature, structurally. From the manufacturer: “In basic terms, solid surfacing is a slab of durable, hard plastic that is the same color all the way through (compared to laminate, which is not) … In not-so-basic terms, solid surfacing is created from a natural mineral fiber called aluminium trihydrate (ATH), plus binding resins and pigments for color.” (Formica company U.S. spelling preserved in the quote.) Aluminium trihydrate comes from bauxite ore. This stuff is a cousin of quartz countertops, which are made from quartz dust, resin and pigments.

Everform is manufactured in thick sheets and, like regular Formica, can be molded. I don’t know how this happens but, when you join the sheets together to cover longer expanses, the seams completely disappear. (There is a 112-page fabrication guide you can download that likely provides a step-by-step on how this seamless seaming happens but, hey, at this stage I’m happy with “magic” as an answer.) I was so excited by this stuff that the first plan was to have it as both countertop and backsplash. However, this material is not heat-rated high enough to go behind a gas stove, so we decided to use tiling for backsplash and stick with the sea glass material on the horizontal surface.

Initially, the kitchen cabinetry company we contracted said they couldn’t provide this countertop: Their usual manufacturer didn’t do it. To their credit, they went outside their normal procedures and finally found someone in nearby Kitchener who would make the counters.

There were so many rules we had to agree to in the course of this manufacturing, and one of them was that a “decision maker” (i.e., me) had to be present when someone from KW Countertop came to measure the space after the base cabinetry had been installed. There were more lasers and measuring devices hooked into a laptop that plotted the space 3D in real time. We then got the installation date confirmed but it was the same day I needed to be out of town for a work commitment. My partner agreed to be the “decision maker” on call.

By the time I saw the counter the next day, all was in and beautiful. However, despite all the measuring, the counter came up almost an inch short on the longest span along the sink wall. The installers said they could make it right thanks to that magic seamless seaming and hustled the piece back to Kitchener, added a you-can’t-see-it’s-added strip of material, brought it back to Stratford, and in it went.

From across the room, you might think this was a plain white countertop. And it doesn’t really show up all that well in a photograph, as you can see: But up close in person, oh, it’s a happy dance of delicate colour that will inspire all the rest of our culinary décor.