Thanks everyone for your further comments. No problem about it being an old post, always nice to communicate with people about design solutions/problems. Jilly, I posted some photos on 1st January 2016, they appear further up in the post. Garden Beet Pty Ltd, and Morel Construction Ltd, both of your solutions look great, but our problem still remains the western Queensland sun which is pretty vicious on anything that will either wilt, fade or break down. It was quite a difficult challenge to come up with something that was affordable, workable and durable. I would love to have had plants because I believe they soften large "hard" exterior areas, but we have decided that we will do that with pots around the pool area. Still have that to do, even after all this time. :) Thanks everyone for re-igniting this chat. Jilly, hope you find something that works for you.

I love our glass splash back. We choose an electric blue as the rest of our kitchen has a lot of timber, white and windows. Easy to keep clean, withstands the heat of the stove and you can choose any colour you like. you can even match it with an existing wall colour if you wanted to. The aluminium one sounds good, but I think that in our climate with salty air and a lot of moisture it would show corrosion spots very quickly. macymacmaples, I agree that there are a lot of choices for tile, but the 'easy to replace' comment doesn't really make sense to me. Then again, I have no idea how easy it would be to replace our splash back, which is wedged between the overhead cupboards and the benchtop - I still love it though, even after 10 years!!!

Rendering a house is an irreversible change, and FYI the spelling of my name is Eastern European - I'm named after my great grandmother, who was Polish and whose name was also spelled that way, so no, my spelling has not been modernised. How insular of you to assume it was. And even if it had been, I didn't choose my name - my parents did, as most people's parents did. You may not understand the heritage value of the midcentury, but that's exactly my point - in the 60s and 70s, no one understood Victorian and Edwardian houses had heritage value, so they vandalised them. These days, people like you don't understand the heritage value of the midcentury, so they rip it down or vandalise it. You're repeating history and you don't even know it.

Hi 1991_kid, though this image may be a render, the stone tops do represent an actual material. You may like to look at the Natural Stone type called Quartzite. Quartzite comes in smaller slab sized that Granite and Man Made Quartz Reconstituted stone slabs and it is very hard (unlike marble) and comes in a variety of different colours. Quartzite stone slabs do come in various types of Grey and does come in a type that has a formation which looks similar to your image. Perhaps something like the Atlantic Stone Quartzite or the Taj Mahal Quartzite or the Grey Cristallo Extra Quartzite. Hope this is of help, Malcolm