Stone bar tops in Aldgate

Yes. Aldgate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC3N, EC3A. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. That has to cover more than the unload, since the corbels, the flat bar and the fixings all come off the van well before the top does. A suspension is booked for the fitting day, not the delivery hour. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The room is genuinely square and the units are plumb, so the visit is more about the building than about the kitchen. What is called a bar in a flat like this is usually the end of a peninsula with stools pushed under it, and the projection was drawn on the layout long before anybody worked out what would carry it. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them.

The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. That matters more on a bar than on a run, because a join forced by the way in cannot be allowed to land in the unsupported part of the nose. The frame is built in the room; only the top has to travel. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. A trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. Bar tops are set once, so the day is planned to allow it.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. A bar is the piece most likely to be added after the kitchen. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. Support follows the seating plan along the whole nose. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. Where the nose has to be carried past something fixed the support moves rather than the stone, since a corbel landing in the knee space is worse than no corbel at all. The knee space is measured before the bracket is specified. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. A home bar is discretionary work, so the edge profile, the corbel detail and the radius on the nose are worth settling properly rather than defaulting to whatever is quickest. The person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Piece size is set by the lift car and the entrance dogleg, which routinely turns a two-piece kitchen into a three-piece one. The carcasses are thin cam-lock boxes that will not take a leaning load on their own, so flat steel is let into them flush with the top of the frame before any stone goes on, rather than corbels being screwed to the front afterwards. Old floors move, so the bar is fixed back as well as down.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. Harder use and stronger cleaning products push the answer towards porcelain or sintered stone, because a resin-bound surface is the one that shows what has been left standing on it. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. Anything that puts a notch in a bar takes material out of the piece at the point people lean on it, so the notch and the support are drawn together or not at all. Where the wall is bowed the rear rail takes it up.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. An overhang on two sides is two separate calculations.