Reception counters and desks in Croydon Town Centre

Yes. Croydon Town Centre is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. A dedicated loading bay or service yard is the easiest arrangement in a managed building, provided the slot is booked and someone has the key to the shutter. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Crew size follows the distance from the van to the lobby. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen is a narrow room off the hall with the window at the far end, so the run is a galley by construction rather than by choice. Estates of this kind carry the buildings that serve them, and every one has a counter the public queues at: a housing office, a health centre, a community hall, a library. A shopfront door caps the counter length before the slab does. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. The back return follows the wall as the wall leans.

The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. 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. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Trolleys cross block paving badly, so boards go down first.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. A spare offcut kept back can save a whole counter later. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. Repeat receptions are worth settling once and then leaving alone.

A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A back-of-counter return is a separate piece with its own edges. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. Column casings take machined returns, not filler. Tell us the hours the building can be worked in and whether the lobby stays open, and send photographs of every corner so we can find the ducts before we draw. 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 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.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. 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 balcony door frequently opens off the kitchen, which puts a threshold, a draught and a well-used route through one end of the run. 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. Where the join lands is a sightline question before it is a slab question.

How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. On a fit-out counter the date is half the decision.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. 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 peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. Every change of plane is a join waiting to be placed well.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Panel joints run vertically down the walls at regular centres and each one is a slight step rather than a smooth curve. These are the counters where the lower transaction shelf earns its keep, because the people served at it are the people the standard was written for, so the knee space and the clear approach to it are checked on site rather than taken off a drawing. A porter's desk stands on its own carcass, fixed into nothing original.