Reception counters and desks in Campden Hill

Yes. Campden Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W8. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The counter comes off the van first and goes in last. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The closet wing is a narrow projection at the back with windows on two sides, which leaves very little continuous wall for a run. 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. Protected finishes decide the fixings before the drawing is finished. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. Where the plaster bows, the counter is drawn away from it.

Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. 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. Every re-grip near a finished front edge is planned out beforehand. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A booked bay costs less than an hour of a crew standing still.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Where the lobby stays open, the work runs outside opening hours. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. A spare offcut kept back can save a whole counter later.

An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. The counter shape follows the queue first and the slab second. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. A shadow gap solves what a scribe cannot. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. The operator uses the counter; the owner pays for it.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. The counter is sized to the way in before it is sized to the slab.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. That entrance is what caps the counter, because a shopfront door and the step in front of it will take far less than a full-length top, so the run is broken over a support in the carcass rather than gambled on. A desk seen from a whole floor is finished on every edge.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. The drawing follows the carcass; the carcass does not follow the drawing.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. A basement is often reached by its own door under the front steps, and that door is smaller than anything else on the route. 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. Clinic counters carry a card reader and a screen at the low level.