An anisotropic area functional is often used as a model for the free energy of a crystal surface. For models of faceting, the anisotropy is typically such that the functional becomes non-convex, and then it may be appropriate to regularize it with an additional term involving curvature. When the weight of the curvature term tends to zero, this gives rise to a singular perturbation problem.The structure of this problem is comparable to the theory of phase transitions studied first by Modica and

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... ortola. Their ideas are also useful in this context, but they have to be combined with adequate geometric tools. In particular, a variant of the theory of curvature varifolds, introduced by Hutchinson, is used in this paper. This allows an analysis of the asymptotic behaviour of the energy functionals.