Concrete goes upscale

Among the fine finishing materials available to builders and remodelers there are some established stars: Corian, tile, and granite each have their boosters. Just eye the neighbors' new kitchen countertops to see which is in vogue.

But when the stone dust settles later this decade, don't be surprised to see the warm patina of ... concrete.

It's not only counters. Think half walls and columns, bathtubs and sinks. The popularity of decorative forms of concrete - a material that may still evoke the image of a Politburo building or parking garage - has firmly set on the West Coast and now crept east.

Decorators and bold homeowners hail its free-form nature and its capacity to reflect an individual's taste through imprints, inlays, and colors.

It's not cheap; installations often cost about the same as granite. And it's not always easy. But if some contractors still balk at the potential complexity, say experts, others are tapping their inner artisans and happily expanding past more repetitive, pour-and-smooth "flatwork."

"The myth of concrete as a dull, gray, not especially aesthetically pleasing material is starting to be shattered," says Jim Niehoff, spokesman for a clearly interested party, the Portland Cement Association in Skokie, Ill. His organization tracks the market share of homes built primarily of concrete - of which portland cement is a key component.

That share grew from 3 percent in 1993 to more than 16 percent in 2003. But not all of the action is on the structural side, says Mr. Niehoff, who notes a surge in the use of stained and stamped concrete for interior uses.

"The number of inquiries that we get regarding concrete countertops," he says, "has also increased dramatically over the past several years."

"It absolutely has not hit its peak," says Bev Garnant, executive director of the American Society of Concrete Contractors in St. Louis.

Statistics on decorative concrete, she says, have not been compiled. Still, where once the main uses were countertops, some contractors now report calls for full kitchens. One builder she knows offers a palette of some 800 colors.

Bay Area craftsman Gary Nakamoto points to a recent trend toward adding crushed glass to mixed concrete. "You can add a lot of variation to it," he says. "Most recently I've seen [glass-infused concrete] that's highly polished, almost like terrazzo."

The expressive new uses actually represent a renaissance. By the turn of the last century, concrete - steel-reinforced since the 1860s - was being seen as something more than just "an underlayment material," says Fu-Tung Cheng, principal of the Berkeley, Calif., Cheng Design and author of "Concrete at Home."

Its popularity raged on into the 1930s, he says. It waned in the postwar years as steel and plastic reigned.

"What I'm trying to do is put some emotional soul back into modernist work," says Mr. Cheng, who stresses concrete's art-form component. He favors unique surfaces - stamped with such found objects as old auto parts, or tin ceiling tiles. Concrete around Cheng's fireplaces is often hand-tooled to look like stonework.

Homeowners shouldn't be timid about taking what can seem like a modernist leap, he says. The look might not be for everyone, but consider the degree of mix-and-match already being done. "People say 'I have a traditional kitchen,' " Cheng says, "and they're sitting there with six-burner, stainless-steel stoves and SubZero refrigerators - and all of this with cabinets in a 16th-century French derivative of rococo."

Concrete is not entirely out of the reach of the do-it-yourself, Home Depot set. Cheng has sent bags of mix and instructions home with his firm's secretarial staffers and friends - and witnessed success.

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