Reception counters and desks 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. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. 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. Goods lifts in old warehouses take longer pieces than most buildings. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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. Stone will not straighten joinery, and it will not forgive it either.

Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. 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. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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 particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. 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. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. A desk somebody sits at all day is specified for wear. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. Card reader positions come from the operator, not the architect.

Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. The public side and the staff side take different details. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The front edge runs straight whatever the wall behind it does. 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. Work between tenancies runs against a fixed date rather than a preference, and stone has a lead time that has to fit inside that window with a few days spare. 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.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. A communal flight is out of use while a piece is on it, so the carry is timed so nobody is trying to pass on a half-landing. A lobby is one of the few places a piece can be staged, so the counter comes in early and stands on trestles until the carcass is ready for it. Protection stays down until the last piece is bedded.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow deep unit off a parade, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. The knee recess is argued over hardest where the floor is shallowest.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. An external corner on a counter is seen from both sides at once, so it is mitred rather than butted and the pattern is carried round it. Nothing is drawn square that the carcass did not build square.

Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. 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. Two working surfaces at two heights, a return between them and clear knee space under the lower one: that is the shape almost every counter ends up being, whatever the front elevation promised. The desk is furniture, so all four edges get the same finish.