Reception counters and desks in Arsenal

Yes. Arsenal is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N5, N7. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Where a road is shut for filming or for works the diversion adds distance to the carry even when parking itself was never the problem. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. An early slot buys an empty street and an empty lobby at once. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Marketing suites get a permanent counter for a temporary lobby. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. What a counter is scribed to is the joiner's carcass rather than the plaster, which is why it is templated after the carcass is fixed and never before. Column casings take machined returns, not filler.

Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. Two heights means two carries, and the low one is not the difficult one. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Waiting time on a counter job is the most expensive hour of it.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. Card reader positions come from the operator, not the architect. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. A fit-out programme puts the counter last, behind the joiner and the electrician, which is exactly when the least time is left to template it. Two desks on one site still take two templates.

Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. A shallow shelf still needs a support run of its own. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. What is out of true gets measured, not talked around. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. The same split runs through commercial property: a landlord fitting out a shell and a tenant fitting out their own reception want different things from one counter. Sign-off happens before nesting, never after it.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. On an event day the controls are wider, tighter and enforced harder than the signage suggests on any other morning of the week. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. The counter comes off the van first and goes in last.

Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. That entrance is what caps the counter, because a shopfront door and the step in front of it will take far less than a full-length top, so the run is broken over a support in the carcass rather than gambled on. Concierge desks work as a post room and a security point at once.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Lower ground floor kitchens are reached by a stair with a winder in it, and the head height over that winder is lower than the room at either end. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. Front of house is read from standing height and from seated height both.

Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. The apertures for cable and card readers are what changes between one desk and the next, and every change is a fresh drawing rather than a variation. Matching across sites means matching blocks, not matching names.