Many years ago, we had a friend that wanted to make his whole house out of exposed concrete with curving walls................. wonder what ever happened to him?? As for me, ah, no!

This is going to come down to what your space is like, light, how you use the kitchen, how does it relate to other areas of the house ie. is it open plan, so needs to complement other areas such as dining & family? Here are a few examples of backsplashes with concrete benchtops. Depends on your personal style & taste as to what appeals to you. My 1st reaction was marble, it would give interest & movement but without knowing what else you have going on in the room...

Well it's is simple, as we will now have concrete floor that get huge amount of winter sunlight in that main living room area our thermal mass figure went up. with the use of phase change material in the roof it to give a thermal mass effect but lot less weight. What it does is stores the energy/heat and transfers it back into room a night. You must realise that this is a very exposed site and we had to get min 6 star rating. Our insulation goes like this from roof down 1, R7 Rock wool batts 2. 90mm Phase change Material 3. to support pcm you have to use 12mm ply sheeting in place of plasterboard 4. Float concrete 5. Electric in slab heating 6. Precast tilt, but played down slabs Underslab 7. R7 Rock wool again 8. 75mm foam batts 9. Reflective foil 10. Box in around steel and make air tight as possible Also all the glass is double glazed, argon filled and thermal shield. We had all that minus pcm and failed because standard way of accessing doesn't have it in calulations. i had to go and show council a sample of the stuff an how it works. This is not cheap but we can just about say that room will sit at a constant 21 to 24 degrees all year around without need for air conditioning . Phase change article

We went with Monument and I am delighted. I was worried about it making the house hotter, but not at all as we added some extra insulation while the roof was lifted. We look over our roof to Mt Dandenong and it really feels like we are floating above the rooftops now (previously had a lighter color). I have also noticed there is far less glare being darker. Pic below is not my best shots ... but you get the idea. Forgot to add we also have a flat cliplock roof and used a combination of Monument and Dune on the house.