Kitchen worktops in Brompton

Yes. Behind the Brompton Road shopping frontages the houses are deep and narrow with kitchens at lower ground, and many have been extended into a small rear courtyard giving an L of 3.2m by 2m. Flats over the retail parades have kitchens squeezed against a party wall with a lot of pipework boxed in, so the worktop is scribed to boxing rather than to plaster. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew.

red-brick Victorian terrace, stucco terrace, mansion flat over shop and mews behind the main road. A flat over a shop is reached by a separate street door and a straight steep stair, and that stair is the whole access question. Runs commonly finish at a doorway, and the architrave and skirting stand proud of the plaster, so the end of the top is notched or stopped on the drawing. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn.

The main road is a red route with no stopping in the day, so unloading happens on the mews and side streets and the carry-in is on foot through gardens or a shared side passage. Flats above shops are reached by a single narrow street door and a straight steep stair with a hard 90 at the top, which is the piece-length limiter. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

Worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. 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. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Same batch, same run, same day. Scribing is the skill here - decades of boxed-in services mean almost nothing behind a base unit is actually straight or plumb.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Carcasses have to be sound first. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. A tall panel that fits at the worktop will stand off the wall at the top unless the wall is dubbed out or the panel is scribed. Make the wall good first, or accept the detail. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

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. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Decided before fabrication, not after. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.