Kitchen worktops in Fitzrovia

Yes. Mostly apartments, many carved out of former commercial floors, which gives an open-plan kitchen along one wall of a large room at 3-4m and sometimes a genuine island where the floorplate allows. The older above-shop flats are the opposite, tiny and tucked behind a hall with services in the worst possible corner. Where a loading concession applies at all, it holds only while something is being carried, which makes it a way to unload rather than a way to park. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. What comes off first is settled before the doors shut.

Georgian terrace above retail, warehouse and office conversion, 1930s block and modern apartment. The stair from the street is narrow with a tight turn at the top, which caps piece length well below anything the run itself needs. These have a back door straight into the kitchen so getting pieces in is rarely the issue, but the room is small and the runs are short, which puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on a single length of stone. Cut-outs are placed where the fabric will take them.

Congestion Charge zone, Monday to Saturday controlled parking, delivery restrictions on the busier streets, and buildings that open straight onto the pavement with no forecourt. The converted commercial buildings have goods lifts worth booking, while the Georgian above-shop flats have none at all. Whether the stone can stand on end in the car is the first question, because a lift that takes 2.1m upright takes nothing like that lying flat. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Protection comes up only when the last piece is inside.

Worktop installation and worktop fabrication, in that order. 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 fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Six flats, six days, one kitchen at a time. In the converted commercial buildings a full-length slab usually goes up in the goods lift, so check it before templating instead of designing in joins you do not need.

A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. A waterfall leg is cut in sequence off its own top. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The gap closes on the grinder, not in the sealant gun. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one figure.

Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Booked with whoever actually holds the keys. Let us know the building when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are handled beforehand rather than on the fitting day.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Level is checked across the room, not along one wall.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. A stub wall divides the kitchen from the back lobby, and it rarely stayed where the original drawing put it. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Book-matching is decided at the slab, not at the saw.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. The way in is agreed before the crew is booked, not after.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Cut-outs are machined with the piece bedded down.