Reception counters and desks in Dartmouth Park

Yes. Dartmouth Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW5. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The van stays put while the carcass is being scribed to. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original quarry tiles survive under a later vinyl in many of these, and lifting the units off them shows how far the floor has fallen towards the garden end. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Where the hall is tall, the light finds every seam in the counter. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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 knee recess is checked for square before the shelf is cut.

Boxed-in pipework running along the skirting looks harmless until a loaded trolley has to pass it. 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. Nothing is carried through a reception still taking visitors. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A red route puts a clock on a counter that will not be rushed.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Nothing is cut until the joinery has been signed off. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. A phased fit-out gets phased templating, one lobby at a time.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. A counter join lines up with the plane above it or it gets moved. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. Two levels means two datums, and they are reconciled on paper. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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 building manager sets the hours the counter goes in.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. The public face is the face that has to be right.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. The apertures for cable and card readers are what changes between one desk and the next, and every change is a fresh drawing rather than a variation. What the operator needs at the shelf outranks the elevation.

A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for the day. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. The way in is walked with the joiner as well as with a tape.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. The outrigger shares a party wall with the addition next door for its whole length, so one long side of the kitchen is solid brick with another kitchen on the far side of it. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow deep unit off a parade, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Housing office counters get cleaned harder than they get used.