Kitchen worktops in Battersea Park

Yes. Mansion flats facing the park have kitchens carved from original service rooms, deep but narrow, with a run down one wall and a tall larder unit where the old scullery door was. Owners commonly open the kitchen to a reception room, which puts a peninsula in the structural opening. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. Old tops out and new stone in, both through the same gap.

Edwardian mansion block, Victorian villa and Interwar purpose-built flat. Sash windows sit in deep reveals with a working box behind the lining, so a run dying into one has to clear more than the plaster. A mansion block is a logistics job before it is a stone job. Everything the last fit ignored is visible for a morning.

Mansion blocks have wide communal stairs but many have no lift or only a small original passenger lift, and porters restrict working hours. Flat entrance doors are often original and narrower than the corridor suggests. Timber nosings chip under a slipped edge, so the treads are covered along the whole flight rather than only at the landings. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Four hands or eight is settled before the tail lift drops.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. One kitchen out of use, never the whole house. Peninsulas set into a structural opening need the finished opening measured after the steel is cased, because the casing adds 40 to 60mm each side that the architect's drawing ignores.

Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Level the units first, measure the shape second. Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The last hundred millimetres decide how it reads. Expect material from £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised on their own lines rather than folded into one figure.

Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Owner or agent, somebody has to be reachable. Mention the building when you book. The lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice then go into the plan instead of turning up on the day.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. A steep pitch shortens the tread and lengthens the reach, which leaves whoever is below carrying most of the weight for the full flight. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. Suction pads go on once the face is clean and dry, not before.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. It sets the crew: two fitters where the route is straightforward, four where it is not. Nothing is carried past an obstruction that could have been moved.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. These kitchens were service rooms once, so they are long, narrow and further from the entrance than the floor plan suggests. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Nothing new goes down until the run reads level end to end.

Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The flats are stacked identically, so the kitchen above sits directly over this one and its waste passes through the same boxing. A full stone piece is several times the weight of the laminate coming out, and there is rarely room to turn it on a half-landing. The shell is the constant here; the surface is not.