Granite Countertop Slabs Louisville Brothers carve success in stone. They travel the world to find the best marble & granite slabs By Bill Wolfe bwolfe@courier-journal.com The Courier-Journal Kevin Burk flew out of Louisville last week on a shopping trip to Spain and Italy. His half brother, Ben Hardin, is about to head for a week in India. Still to come this year will be two or three visits to Brazil, and return flights to Europe and India. On their shopping list: multiple tons of granite, marble and other stone materials enjoying growing popularity with home builders and remodelers. The brothers are also business partners, and they travel the world to hand-select supplies for their Jeffersontown business, Axis Granite. "We sell so many slabs that we've got to continually go to these places to maintain our stock," Hardin said. "We don't just go over there and buy enough to last us a full year. There's no way we can store that much material." The frequent buying trips are also a sign of the importance they place on personally inspecting and selecting the quarried stone. "It's interesting, because you always see new and exciting things when you go, new colors and patterns of stone," Hardin said. What makes it worthwhile is "finding that needle in the haystack -- that new and exiting color that's coming out … that just blows the roof off." Marble and granite are formed, he said, from magma rising from below the earth's crust and settling into pockets. "When it cools, the minerals that it's grabbed onto basically gives it its color and its design, or pattern." Stone is quarried in large blocks, then sliced into slabs with diamond-edged saws and polished before being sold to distributors like Axis. Slabs of stone -- each weighing about 1,000 pounds -- cross the ocean by ship and are usually unloaded at Norfolk, Va. They then travel by rail to Louisville. Freight forwarders complete the shipment to Axis in the Bluegrass Industrial Park. Marble is used primarily for bathroom vanities, countertops and flooring, Hardin said. Granite is widely used for kitchen countertops, bar tops and bathroom vanities. Axis also sells limestone, slate, onyx and travertine. Though Louisville is generally a conservative market, "a lot of people are wanting something that's fun and unusual and different, that their neighbor doesn't have," Hardin said. For example, "We have bright red slabs for the U of L fans and dark blue slabs for the UK fans." Axis Granite's sales have doubled each year since its founding in March 2005. Over the last year, the company sold about 300,000 square feet of granite -- more than 4 million pounds. Hardin, 30, was in Oklahoma, where he had been approached by a former Oral Roberts University classmate from India about importing Indian granite. He shared the idea with Burk, 35, and the two set up shop in their hometown of Shelbyville. (Go to page 2)