Reception counters and desks in Fitzrovia

Yes. Fitzrovia is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W1T, W1W. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. A red route puts a clock on a counter that will not be rushed. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A flat over a shop is reached by a separate street door and a straight steep stair, and that stair is the whole access question. 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. A porter's desk stands on its own carcass, fixed into nothing original. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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 scribe is cut in the shop, eased on site, and no further.

A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. 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. Lobby floors are boarded before the first piece comes off the trolley. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Where the bay is booked by the hour, pieces come off in fitting order.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop fabrication and worktop design & quotation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. 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. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. The knee recess is not a variable between sites. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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. A counter in a working building is an evening job.

Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A curved front is a waterjet job and a carcass problem both. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. Stone will not straighten joinery, and it will not forgive it either. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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 counter drawing is signed by whoever is paying for it.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. A stub wall divides the kitchen from the back lobby, and it rarely stayed where the original drawing put it. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. Every counter starts with the joiner finishing.

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. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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. External corners on a counter are mitred, never butted.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. A boiler hangs on the wall above the run in most of these, and its pipework drops exactly where a splashback wants to go. Two working surfaces at two heights, a return between them and clear knee space under the lower one: that is the shape almost every counter ends up being, whatever the front elevation promised. The return between the two levels is the piece everything works off.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The front edge runs straight whatever the wall behind it does.