Kitchen worktops in East Village

Yes. Every flat came with the same developer kitchen: a single-wall run of roughly 2.7m to 3.2m in an open living space, wall units to one side and a tall appliance stack, with no island. Almost all work here is replacing the original top like for like in a fully fitted kitchen, so cabinets stay and the stone has to match the existing sink and hob positions. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew.

2012 athletes' village apartment and post-2015 infill apartment block. The room is genuinely square and the units are plumb, so the visit is more about the building than about the kitchen. The plasterboard is genuinely flat here, so a full-height splashback sits well and a slim upstand looks almost redundant, but the sockets are the problem, because they are set out to the developer's original kitchen and often land at odd heights or right on a joint line. The wall makes that decision, not the brochure.

The estate is car-free in the residential courtyards with a private management company controlling access, so vehicles use designated service bays and the last stretch is a trolley run across podium paving. Deliveries and lift use must be booked with the estate management team, usually with a fixed window and a lift protection requirement. Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. Splashback panels are lighter than a worktop and far more awkward, because a tall thin piece has to be carried on edge and cannot be tilted to clear a turn. Joint positions follow from that.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A day, not a project. Because the kitchens are identical across blocks, the layouts repeat, but the estate access rules mean the booking has to be made before the template is even scheduled.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. Joint placement is a decision, not an accident. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. A tall panel that fits at the worktop will stand off the wall at the top unless the wall is dubbed out or the panel is scribed. An upstand rides what a panel exposes. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Units kept, surface changed. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.