Stone bar tops in Belgravia

Yes. Belgravia is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW1W, SW1X. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. 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. 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. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. What the room will take decides the stool count. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. A corbel never lands where a knee goes.

Sintered stone at 12mm changes what a staircase can take, because the same run arrives at roughly half the weight of the granite equivalent. 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. Cellar bars go down a flight, which is the harder direction. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. The van stands for the frame as well as the top.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. 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. The steel is priced with the bar, not after it. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. Drinks left standing decide the material more than looks do.

A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. A bar laid over that is a second level rather than a wider one, so it wants a spine underneath it and a settled detail where the two heights meet. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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 bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Nobody reseals a worktop annually in a let property, so a material that depends on being resealed is the wrong specification however well it photographs. 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 support is specified for the next occupant as well.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Gas, waste and later wiring were boxed in against the wall long after the house was built, and that boxing is what the run has to clear. A bar top put into a room like that is an overhang question first, because the nose has to carry people leaning on it long after the slab has stopped being interesting. People push against the front edge, so the front edge gets the steel.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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. A notch in a bar top is drawn with its support beside it.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A piece carried on edge up a flight has to clear the ceiling above the stairs as well as the walls either side of it. The steel and the corbels travel that same route and go in first, so a bar is three separate carries into one room rather than a single delivery. Front tier and back tier are carried and set as two pieces.

Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. Wide doors make piece length a choice rather than a limit.