Stone bar tops in Brook Green

Yes. Brook Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W6, W14. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. A licensed room sets the hours and the parking has to agree. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The original scullery gully is still live in the yard outside the back door, and new waste from the sink joins a drain laid for a copper and a stone sink. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. A long counter is a beam before it is a surface. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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 bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true.

An inward-opening door swinging back against the wall leaves less clear opening than the frame measures, and a storm porch in front of it is tighter again. 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. Two people to a bar top, four where the nose is deep. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose.

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 fabrication 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. Two households cooking in one kitchen means two of most things, and the run has to carry a second sink or a second oven without losing its working length. 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. A serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads. An annexe kitchen is often built to keep a parent independent, so worktop height and reach matter as much as the material does. Harder use and stronger cleaning products push the answer towards porcelain or sintered stone, because a resin-bound surface is the one that shows what has been left standing on it. The steel is priced with the bar, not after it.

On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. 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. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. A bar top is levelled to itself rather than to what it stands on, so the packing goes into the frame and the stools take up whatever the floor is doing. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them. 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. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. 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. A chipped front edge can be dressed in place.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. 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 template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The kitchen normally sits in the back addition or a later side return, which puts the run against the oldest and least straight wall in the building. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. The overhang decides the bar, and the bar decides the stone.

Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. 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. The apron is bonded on the bench, never built up in the room.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. What carries a bar top here is rarely a kitchen carcass, so the framing underneath gets looked at before anything is measured across the top of it. Drinks stand on it for hours, which changes the material answer.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. The bar length answers to the seats, not to the wall behind it.