Worktops 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. 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. Whatever the standing allows, the stone leaves that van finished, because every edge, cut-out and internal radius is machined at the works and none of it is open to reconsideration at the kerb. The film stays on the face until the last trade leaves. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

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. Alcoves either side of the old breast chop the run into short lengths, and a kitchen made of short lengths is the case where buying a slab outright beats buying the square metres, because the remainder is paid for in both. Save on the colour before you save on the thickness. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. A hob dropped into the middle of a length puts sustained warmth at the lip of a cut-out, and an engineered surface will yellow there across ten years where a natural one takes it without comment. Brittle stone and narrow returns are a poor pairing.

Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. That caps the longest piece, and a run split into two lengths nests differently on the slab, which moves the yield and moves the figure with it. A long granite length at full thickness is four hands, not two. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. A granite kitchen ends its day with a sealer, and a sealer wants a dry face and a quiet hour afterwards, so that hour is written into the day rather than borrowed from it. Four quartz samples arrive by post, well before anything else does.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. Where several kitchens are ordered together the sensible move is to take them all off one batch, because two slabs of the same name bought six months apart will not sit happily in the same building. Order the stone against the room, never against the drawing. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. Volume work tends to live at the entry end of the range, and the entry end is genuine stone rather than a compromise, since the lowest supply figure we quote is a sintered surface and not a thin laminate pretending to be one. Several kitchens at once should come off a single batch.

Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. A shape like that nests kindly on a slab, so more of what gets bought ends up on the units and the rate per square metre behaves much as the brochure says it will. Nesting is where the quiet savings on a kitchen live. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. A run that sits under strong sun for hours every afternoon suits a surface built to be stable in daylight, because a resin-bound stone is made for indoor use and sustained sunlight is the one thing it was never designed around. What the room obstructs, the layout pays for in slab. Send the run lengths, say where the sink and hob will sit, and tell us which way the room faces and what lighting is going in above the working run. A landlord with several similar flats usually wants one specification repeated, so the material, the edge detail and the upstand height are recorded and reused rather than rechosen each time. That changes which questions are worth asking about the stone, because somebody staying put wants to know how a honed face marks in five years and somebody selling wants to know how it photographs next spring. Phasing works only if the second phase matches the first batch.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. A deep scribe eats into the back of the piece, which is quietly important on a stone with directional figure, since the pattern moves backwards as that depth comes off. A cut-out beside a notch leaves very little stone in between.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. Rooms in these houses run long and narrow with the only honest daylight at the garden end, so a pale honed surface does more for the working half of the kitchen than any colour with depth in it. Two slabs change the question from price to preference.

The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. 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. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. Which stone belongs on top of all that is a separate question from the building itself, and it is the one with a figure attached, because supply alone runs from £110 to £550 per square metre before a single cut has been made. Yield is the word behind most quotations people did not expect.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Sintered stone at 12mm changes what a staircase can take, because the same run arrives at roughly half the weight of the granite equivalent. Where a seam becomes unavoidable the choice of stone starts to matter, because a fine even speckle closes a joint almost invisibly and a broad vein simply will not. What will not travel whole is designed to break somewhere sensible.