Worktops in Dulwich Village

Yes. Dulwich Village is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE21. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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. Stone is delivered machined, sealed and covered, in that order. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These were built on a solid ground floor slab, so nothing bounces and nothing can be packed down, only up. These kitchens are small and roughly square, so the run is short, the join count is low and the material band accounts for almost all of the figure rather than the bench time. Honed hides the dust an older house makes all year. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. 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. Heat at the lip of an opening is the slow kind of damage.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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. The protective film peels off last so the finish is untouched. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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. The face is uncovered once, and that once is at handover.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Fitting follows template by five to ten working days. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Four samples by post settle more than four showroom visits.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. 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. Where the shape is broken, a repeating pattern is worth money. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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 obstruction is templated as found and cut as templated. Measure the run between the walls, note the cill height above the units, and tell us the thickness of the top that is coming off. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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. A surface nobody maintains should not need maintaining.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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 window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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. Movement in a stone needs length to read as anything at all.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. A deep scribe eats into the back of the piece, which is quietly important on a stone with directional figure, since the pattern moves backwards as that depth comes off. A tight inside corner is where brittle material gives up.

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 piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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. Long unbroken lengths are what make a plain stone look dear.

A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Garden routes carry their own hazards: a drain cover, a step up to a patio, wet decking, or a lawn that will not take a loaded trolley. Sintered stone at twelve millimetres weighs roughly half what thirty millimetre granite weighs, so a punishing route can genuinely rule one material in and another out. A remnant worth keeping rides back on the van rather than to a skip.