Kitchen worktops in Campden Hill

Yes. Houses on the hill are frequently narrow-fronted and tall, four and five storeys over a basement, so the kitchen is deep in the lower ground with restricted headroom and a small rear lightwell. Runs are modest for the value of the property - 3m against one wall plus a 1.6-2m peninsula is common because the plan simply is not wide enough for a proper island. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. A van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. The parking dictates the sequence, not the kitchen.

early Victorian villa, Georgian cottage terrace, purpose-built 1930s flats and mews and coach house. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. The day is planned backwards from the hall. Soft brick takes a different plug to blockwork.

The gradient is the issue: the streets rise sharply, kerbs are high and a loaded trolley wants to run away from you downhill, so slabs get walked rather than wheeled. Many houses have narrow original front doors with fanlights that cannot be removed and internal stairs with a winder at the basement flight. A short run of external steps before the communal door means a piece is lifted twice before the staircase proper has even started. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. An access join is dressed to the same standard as any other.

Worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. A batch split across two weeks stops being a batch. Tall narrow houses with winder stairs - if the piece will not make the winder, it comes in through the front lightwell grating opening or it does not come in at all.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Steel under the overhang before stone goes near it. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. The notch is machined, never ground in later. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Whoever holds the budget sees the drawing first. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Where the walls have been dry-lined over the old lath there is a void behind the board and no solid fixing until a batten is found. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. The first hour is protection and packing, not stone.

Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Matched means the same block, not the same name.

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. No payment is due before the template. Chimney breasts are often taken out at ground level and left standing above, so the middle of the run is newer wall than the two ends of it. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. Every unit gets a level on it before a piece lands.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. The longest piece is capped in the workshop, deliberately.