Reception counters and desks in Askew Road

Yes. Askew Road is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W12. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Where the goods entrance is round the back, the carry is priced from there. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

That rear wall carries the back door and the only window, which leaves very little uninterrupted length for a sink run. 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. The building around the lobby decides the counter more than the brief does. 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 counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. Column casings take machined returns, not filler.

A step up off the pavement means the piece is lifted to the threshold before it is carried anywhere, and that first lift is the one that wants four hands. 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. Trestles go up in the lobby before anything is unwrapped. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. An early slot buys an empty street and an empty lobby at once.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Card reader positions come from the operator, not the architect. 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. 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. Two desks on one site still take two templates.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Support positions go on the drawing before the top is nested. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Waiting time on a counter job is the most expensive hour of it.

Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Many have had the ground floor chimney breast removed to gain three hundred millimetres, and the gained strip is newer blockwork standing proud of the old plaster. 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. A shopfront door caps the counter length before the slab does.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above it. 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.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. 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.