Reception counters and desks in Collier Row

Yes. Collier Row is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM5. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A bay suspension is a line on the quote, not a surprise. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Ceiling heights dropped after the war, so there is less wall between the worktop and the wall units than in anything older. The parades behind terraces of this period carry pharmacies, minicab offices, takeaways and small surgeries, and their counters are the hardest-used stone we fit. Housing office counters get cleaned harder than they get used. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. Stone will not straighten joinery, and it will not forgive it either.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. A knee recess is an opening, and an opening weakens a piece in transit. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Two heights, one unload, one trip across the pavement.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop design & quotation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Batching several kitchens together is the one situation where buying a whole slab is cheaper per kitchen rather than more expensive. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. A phased fit-out gets phased templating, one lobby at a time. A licensed shared house has fire-door and escape-route rules that decide how and when stone can be carried through the common parts. 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. What the operator needs at the shelf outranks the elevation.

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. 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. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. The front edge runs straight whatever the wall behind it does. Tell us whether there is rear access off a service road, and send the carcass dimensions with the till, terminal and cable positions marked on them. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. Where a managing agent has to approve the work, the drawing goes out in a form they can sign without ever standing in the lobby. Somebody has to book the lift, and it is rarely the receptionist.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. A lobby is one of the few places a piece can be staged, so the counter comes in early and stands on trestles until the carcass is ready for it. Every re-grip near a finished front edge is planned out beforehand.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Four kitchens ordered together take one template visit and one delivery, and that is where the saving comes from rather than from a discount on the stone. 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. The knee recess is not a variable between sites.

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. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. Where the plaster bows, the counter is drawn away from it.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. 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 external corner on a counter is seen from both sides at once, so it is mitred rather than butted and the pattern is carried round it. Shelf depth is set by the knee space underneath it.