Restaurant and cafe table tops in Fortune Green

Yes. Fortune Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW6, NW2. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Access is a question about the plot rather than the house: a narrow frontage between older buildings with nowhere obvious to stand a van. The commercial space in a new block is a ground-floor unit with a service bay or a loading door behind it, and that is the most straightforward delivery a table order gets: a level threshold, a flat floor and a goods lift where the unit runs over more than one level. Deliveries follow the premises rather than the postcode. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. The clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed.

Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. Nothing is carried past a chair still in the gangway. 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. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. Spares are cheap while the run is still on the ground. Replacing one plot years after handover is the problem nobody plans for, because a quartz colour can be reordered and a granite block cannot. A room opening in a second phase is worth naming now, while the material is still on the ground and a match is a telephone call. The batch reference goes on file with the drawing.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. The largest blank is nested first and the rest around it. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. Room by room, since no two of them are the same. Send the fit-out drawing with final table positions and sizes, the base specification, and the delivery window the managing agent is prepared to accept. 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 table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. Sign-off covers shape, edge, drilling and count.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Block and beam floors with blockwork walls are true enough that the scribes are light and the joins can be pulled tight. The complication is the programme rather than the building. A shell unit is drawn before it is measured.

Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. Where the standing is short the pieces are counted off at the tail lift against the plan rather than checked once they are already inside. Somewhere to stand the frames matters more than the distance.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The kitchen is usually part of the living space, so three edges are read from a sofa rather than from standing height at the sink. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Made to the plate you own, so nothing else has to be replaced.