Worktops in Cheapside

Yes. Cheapside is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2V. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. 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. Whatever the standing allows, the stone leaves that van finished, because every edge, cut-out and internal radius is machined at the works and none of it is open to reconsideration at the kerb. The packaging and the spent cartridges leave with the crew. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Kitchens in these flats are frequently in what was a bedroom or a return room, so the window is tall and its sill sits close to worktop height. The kitchen in one of these sits in the back addition and takes its daylight from one end, so the working half of the run is the darker half and a pale stone with a honed or matt face does more there than any colour with depth in it. Side light flatters movement and wastes a flat colour. Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. Every notch and every scribe is machined into the piece before it leaves the works, and a hard sintered surface is the least forgiving of a tight internal corner, so one is always cut with a generous radius. What the room obstructs, the layout pays for in slab.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. That caps the longest piece, and a run split into two lengths nests differently on the slab, which moves the yield and moves the figure with it. Damage in transit lands on corners, so corners get eased. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. A granite kitchen ends its day with a sealer, and a sealer wants a dry face and a quiet hour afterwards, so that hour is written into the day rather than borrowed from it. Dry cutting quartz burns the resin and the burn does not polish out.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Small kitchens in a shared house are all short runs and tight cut-out spacing, which is more bench work per square metre than one large kitchen would be. Where several kitchens are ordered together the sensible move is to take them all off one batch, because two slabs of the same name bought six months apart will not sit happily in the same building. Order the stone against the room, never against the drawing. Batching several kitchens together is the one situation where buying a whole slab is cheaper per kitchen rather than more expensive. Volume work tends to live at the entry end of the range, and the entry end is genuine stone rather than a compromise, since the lowest supply figure we quote is a sintered surface and not a thin laminate pretending to be one. Several kitchens at once should come off a single batch.

Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. A shape like that nests kindly on a slab, so more of what gets bought ends up on the units and the rate per square metre behaves much as the brochure says it will. Where the run beats the slab, the stone decides how the seam reads. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. A hob dropped into the middle of a length puts sustained warmth at the lip of a cut-out, and an engineered surface will yellow there across ten years where a natural one takes it without comment. A cut-out beside a notch leaves very little stone in between. Send the run lengths, say where the sink and hob will sit, and tell us which way the room faces and what lighting is going in above the working run. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. That changes which questions are worth asking about the stone, because somebody staying put wants to know how a honed face marks in five years and somebody selling wants to know how it photographs next spring. Hard use by people who did not choose it points at sintered stone.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. An island is the piece that decides whether one slab covers the kitchen or two, and a second slab arrives as a step in the figure rather than a gentle slope. An overhang is stone and steel priced together, never stone alone.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. A deep scribe comes out of the nest, so how far the stone has to be relieved changes which part of the slab the piece is cut from. A run that sits under strong sun for hours every afternoon suits a surface built to be stable in daylight, because a resin-bound stone is made for indoor use and sustained sunlight is the one thing it was never designed around. Heat at the lip of an opening is the slow kind of damage.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing in a house of this age is square, and the kitchen is usually the part that has been altered most often. Which stone belongs on top of all that is a separate question from the building itself, and it is the one with a figure attached, because supply alone runs from £110 to £550 per square metre before a single cut has been made. What sings in a bright room can go dead in a dark one.

Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. 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 mitred corner asks the pattern to turn through a right angle, which an even speckle does without comment and a marble-look stone makes a performance of. Runs in view together come off adjoining areas of one slab.