Stone worktops in Coldharbour

Yes. Coldharbour is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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. A reserved slab is a slab nobody else is allowed to buy. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The wall between the kitchen and the hall is load-bearing blockwork rather than a stud, so an opening through it is a lintel job and not an afternoon with a bolster. Rooms in this stock are compact and the runs are short, so the whole kitchen often comes off part of one slab and the remainder is the number worth thinking about. Hard-working kitchens suit surfaces that ask for nothing. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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. Short lengths are where a full slab starts to pay for itself.

A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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. Thinner stone carries easily and asks for continuous support. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. Cutting is done wet and extracted, never dry on a pavement.

A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. 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. Edge metreage climbs with corners, not with floor area. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. The narrowest return in the kitchen is its weakest stone. Send the run lengths, a photograph of each corner so we can see the boxings, and tell us how the kitchen is used day to day. Where a landlord or housing provider is involved there is a specification to meet and a process to follow, and both are settled before a date is offered. 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. Stone is a fixture and outlasts the agreement over the room.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. 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 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. Porous or sealed is a decision about the next ten years.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. Where a seam becomes unavoidable the choice of stone starts to matter, because a fine even speckle closes a joint almost invisibly and a broad vein simply will not. Vein direction is settled before the slab is broken into pieces.

Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. 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. A pale honed face earns its keep in a room short of daylight.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Whole streets went up to two or three plans, so the house next door has the same kitchen and forty years of extensions have made none of them measure the same. These kitchens work hard, which argues for surfaces that ask for nothing: engineered stone for its consistency, sintered stone where heat and scratching are daily. Even light lets a mid-tone hold its own.