Soapstone: In High Demand

September 5, 2003

   However, there’s a small-but-growing market for soapstone, fueled by some of the cable-television home and decorating shows. The programs give owners – especially those interested in renovating older homes – a feel for the stone’s history, as well as its own beneficial properties.
   At the same time, a few fabricators, often from outside the industry, find the stone easy to work with because it’s soft enough to be fabricated with hand tools. Their biggest complaint: It’s sometimes difficult to keep up with the demand.
   Even the most-optimistic fabricators, however, don’t think soapstone will ever touch granite in popularity. As a niche market with an opportunity to spin off small custom-made products, they still believe their product has plenty of appeal and plenty of room to grow.

OLD-FASHIONED REPUTATION
   When people talk about custom stonework for the home, most don’t include soapstone in the same breath with granite and marble, if they bother to mention it at all.
   If anything, soapstone has a reputation for being old-fashioned. After all, it was common in home (particularly in New England) dating back a century or two. At that time, the stone was still mainly a U.S. stone; today’s biggest exporters are Brazil and Finland.
   For many people, their main acquaintance with soapstone derives from a high-school science lab, where it’s popular for tables and floors because the density makes the stone impervious to staining.
   Add to that a color palette mostly in the gray range – although today’s material comes in a wide range of gray and blue hues – and there’s little wonder that many stone buyers don’t immediately think of soapstone for their projects.
   Some, however, are thinking again. Often, those fabricators and installers aren’t coming from the stone industry.
   Ron Pihl of Cornerstone Masonry in Pray, Mont., spent years building masonry heaters out of other materials before importing his first soapstone heaters from the Finnish company Tulikivi.
   “In Colonial times soapstone firebrick was used fairly often for fireboxes because it will retain heat longer,” he explains. “Because of the heaviness and the denseness of the stone, it makes a more efficient fireplace because even after the fire is out it will radiate heat for many hours.”
   As big as the demand is for soapstone fireplaces, Pihl says today there’s an even bigger demand for countertops made from the stone. David Brushett of Green Mountain Fabricators in South Barre, Mass., and Mike Wilson of Hummingbird Wood Works and Soapstone in Glen Ellyn, Ill., will certainly second that.
    “I couldn’t believe what an incredible material it is,” he says. “Plus, I like the fact that it’s an old-fashioned material. I’m not a plastics man – I only work with wood and stone – and the properties of soapstone are so superior to everything else that it just bowled me over.”
   Wilson says his company feels that soapstone is the best complement to the high-end cabinetry the firm produces.
   “With the kind of cabinets we build, it fits our kind of look, and it’s a very historic material,” Wilson says. “It would have been in houses 200 years ago, and there aren’t many things that can make that claim today. It just has a nice feel to it. It’s not like you’re introducing something to people for the first time.”
   On the other end of the spectrum, Yves Matson of Calgary, Alberta-based Laser Spec Inc., is on the cutting edge of today’s technology, and he’s sold on the material as well. Matson explains that the company is a consulting firm for CNC technology, and consequently works with a variety of materials that can be shaped using a CNC router.
   As with the others, Matson says the biggest demand for Laser Spec’s soapstone products comes from countertops. However, because the stone doesn’t require diamond tooling, the firm is trying to go beyond that with smaller stone pieces such as bowls and carved signs.
   “Everybody’s got to touch it,” he says. “When people see a stone bowl, they want to run their hands over it, and they tap it. They’re just drawn to it.”

GREAT MATERIAL
   It’s not just the novelty of soapstone that’s catching buyers’ attentions, though. Besides its ability to hold and radiate heat for long periods of time, the stone has other attractive properties.
   For instance, it’s not a particularly slippery stone, making it a good fit in bathrooms and other wet areas.
   “It has a lot to do with how it’s honed,” says Cornerstone’s Pihl. “Of course, it won’t absorb water, but it’s a great material for floors and for showers. And, because of its ability to hold heat, it’s a great addition to a radiant-heating system.
   Wilson agrees. His company is still completing a renovation job to an architect-designed house in Lake Forest, Ill., that features a custom soaking tub in the master bathroom fabricated from soapstone.
   “It’s designed so a full-sized man can sit in it and the water will come up to his neck,” he says. “There’s a well in it that the feet go into, so you can sit on one level and put your feet down into the lower level.”
   Of course, being heavier than granite, the tub had to be lowered through the bathroom ceiling by a crane. And, while the client opted to go with travertine floors for his bath, Wilson says the client’s use of soapstone in the home’s kitchen and library still makes the project the largest one utilizing soapstone that his company handled.
   Along with the soaking tub, the company is doing soapstone countertops for the kitchen and library, a soapstone sink in the kitchen and soapstone kick plates and top trim for the old-fashioned cherry cabinets Hummingbird is custom-building for the kitchen.
   Although the home was originally built in the 1950s and has a contemporary feel, Wilson says the client thought the soapstone created a contemporary look that well with the cabinets.
   Appearance is certainly one thing, and Green Mountain’s Brushett says he believes soapstone beats granite in that regard because its honed finish makes it look cleaner – and its performance also makes it more desirable for use in the kitchen.
   “It’s low-maintenance,” he says. “If a person scratches it or nicks it, he can sand it out in about a minute. You can put hot pots on it. You can spill anything on it and it’s so dense you won’t hurt it. I cut striper bass on my soapstone kitchen table and it doesn’t hold the smell.”
   He adds that soapstone sinks are on a par with stainless steel in commercial kitchens.
    The idea that a customer can make a do-it-yourself repair might not be appealing to all stone fabricators, but it is an easy stone to work with, say those who do so. Pihl notes that it doesn’t tend to spall or chip during fabrication, either.
   “It’s very, very easy to work with,” he says. “It’s extremely dense, but it’s so soft you can cut it with carbide blades on a skill saw. You can file it or sand it. It’s a lot of fun to work with; it’s just a nice, very consistent medium.”
   Laser Spec’s Matson says it’s that easy-to-work-with quality that keeps soapstone as his company’s stone of choice. For handling, he compares it more to solid-surface materials.
   “It we go beyond soapstone, we have to start using diamond bits with water-cooling,” he says. “It gets pretty stressful on our machine. We can rout granite or marble, but it stars requiring different tooling and there are bigger and better machines out there for that than what we’re using.”
   Brushett says his preference is for doing wet fabrication to keep the dust down and the saws cooler. However, a lot of his work is done with regular carpentry tools and vacuums. In fact, because of the ease of fabrication with soapstone, he says a lot of the work is done on-site and without a template.
   “By fabricating on-site, we can do a 50 ft² kitchen in one day,” Brushett says. “If a kitchen company stays in touch with us, we can literally get to a job site the day after a kitchen is installed and have the countertops done at the end of the day.”
   That ability to work the surface using regular hand tools also lets Brushett add still more value to his products.
   “We can take our huge tubs and do artistic things in there,” he says. ‘We just completed work on a rooster that was hand-carved in a backsplash in a kitchen we’re installing. We also have an artist who hand-carves shelves into our sinks.”
   Matson, too, sees a demand for carving in soapstone products, although in his case the work is computerized.
   “For instance, people have been using soapstone to replace the carved wood entryway signs,” he says. “There are certainly signage applications.”

MORE OPPORTUNITY
   Soapstone always had an appeal to hand-carvers because of its comparative softness, and the stone’s ability to take on more-delicate applications is leading to other opportunities.
   Matson says a local artist who was looking for reproductions of his three-dimensional work suggested one idea his company has experimented with.
   “Because we have the ability to scan things, both with a flatbed and a barrel scan, we had a carver interested in doing a series of his work,” he says. “We’d take a 3D scan and resize it if we wanted, then we could rout out versions of his sculpture so he could create a series of even 100 of them.”
   While the technology and the soapstone were up to the challenge, Matson says the artist found that what he could charge for a work produced in multiples wouldn’t support an entire series. However, Matson adds that Laser Spec continues to look at creating items such as cheese and warming plates, laboratory items and vessel bowls in a variety of shapes.
   “There are a lot of things we do in other substrates where there are applications for soapstone,” he says. “There’s a price-point entry barrier, because you have to have a fairly large block before you can make a bowl or something like that. However, the reaction to it is such that an extra $500-$600 for the substrate doesn’t both a lot of people.”
   As a CNC expert, Matson says he also expects to see more people routing soapstone, creating a broader base of products that they otherwise would be making from solid-surface materials.
   “The barrier right now is getting soapstone widely accepted,” he says. “Once it broadens its base, you’ll have thousands of shops with CNC routers that can work soapstone as easily as they work solid-surface. Then, you’ll see more and more people start using soapstone as the stone of choice.”
   Hummingbird’s Wilson is another fabricator who feels there are other decorator-type products that will help bring soapstone to a wider audience. One of the new items Hummingbird is starting to produce is soapstone light bezels to match a counter or sink.
   “In kitchens, the can lights can have real innocuous-looking bezels, so we’re getting into some sconce lights for bathrooms and kitchens,” Wilson says. “What we’re trying to do is extend the look so that people can think of soapstone as something that flows through the design more. It’s not just one item.”
   Cornerstone’s Pihl agrees that there’s plenty of additional potential in soapstone and soapstone products that hasn’t yet been tapped.
   “It’s a stone that hasn’t been tapped for architectural uses in this country,” he says. “The architects and designers haven’t gotten up to speed on soapstone yet. This is still a consumer-driven market. People are doing their research and they’re finding out about soapstone and they’re finding people who have it and can work it.”
   Green Mountain’s Brushett concurs. He says his business has doubled every year in the four years he’s focused on soapstone, to a point where it’s often difficult to keep up with orders.
   “There are a lot of people out there who want real stone but they want the properties of a non-porous and sanitary surface, and soapstone will really do that,” he says. “Plus, it has a 200-year reputation that nobody’s really capitalized on yet.”
   Wilson agrees that most of his soapstone customers know what they’re looking for and find his company through such things as the Internet and trade shows geared to restoration and renovation of older homes. However, he says even the rare person who walks in not knowing about soapstone often will buy it after seeing it and feeling it.
   Still, he doesn’t think soapstone will ever be more than a niche market, even as its popularity continues to grow.
   “This is not for people who buy aluminum siding,” he concludes. “Our customers generally understand that natural materials have a wear process to them and that should be enhanced. Soapstone develops a personality, not like where if you scratch granite you feel like you’ve ruined it. I always tell people if you go real you can’t go wrong – whether it’s wood or stone – but this is an extremely nice material.”