Short answer: choose engineered quartz if you want a surface you never have to think about, and granite if you want a genuinely unique slab that shrugs off heat. Installed cost in Canada is close enough — roughly $74–$96 per square foot for quartz and $62–$71 for granite — that price should not be the deciding factor.
Maintenance
Quartz is non-porous. Wine, coffee, turmeric and citrus sit on the surface rather than soaking in, and it never needs sealing. Granite is porous stone and wants an impregnating sealer roughly once a year.
Heat
This is where granite wins outright. The resin binder in quartz begins to discolour somewhere around 150 °C, so a pan straight off a gas burner can leave a permanent mark. Granite will take it.
Appearance
Quartz is manufactured, so slab 40 looks like slab 4 — helpful if you are matching a condo package. Granite is quarried, so no two slabs match, which is either the point or the problem depending on your taste.
Resale
Canadian appraisers treat both as a premium surface. Neither meaningfully outperforms the other; a badly placed seam hurts resale far more than the choice of material.
Leave a Reply