Kitchen worktops in Castelnau

Yes. Distinctive early Victorian paired villas with tall rooms and deep plans - kitchens usually at the rear or in a lower ground, with 3.5m to 4m runs, high ceilings that allow full-height splashbacks, and space for a proper island in the wider houses. 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. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. One trip is always better than three.

1840s stucco villa, Victorian semi, interwar flats and postwar infill. 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, and the scribing takes longer than the carry. The slow parts are slow for a reason.

The road is a busy artery towards the bridge with red-route style restrictions at peak, so unloading happens in the side turnings; villa front gardens are short with a flight of steps up to a raised entrance. Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

Worktop splashbacks & upstands, worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because a cut-out in the wrong place means a new piece. Siliconed to the worktop, never grouted. Tall rooms tempt full-height slab splashbacks, and at 2.4m plus these become the heaviest single piece on the job - plan the lift for the splashback, not the top.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. The join is the last thing finished. 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. 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 drawing decides it, not the fitter. 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. Splashbacks are cut from the same slab run as the tops, so they have to be decided before fabrication, not after. The wall has to be ready. 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.