Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Frognal

Yes. Frognal is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. A vanity fit is a short visit with one or two pieces in it, so the van stands only for as long as it takes to walk them in. A bathroom return visit is planned around the street, not the diary. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These blocks were built with a lift from new, which will usually take a worktop and almost never takes a full-length island piece. A bathroom in a block like this was usually carved out of a larger room, so the proportions are odd, the ceiling is high and the window reveals are deep enough to be worth cutting in stone. High ceilings do nothing for a vanity, but the reveals do. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Wall-hung means the wall carries the basin, so the wall gets checked.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. A vanity is the one piece of stone that route will not usually defeat, because a top cut to a standard unit depth weighs what one person can manage. A vanity top is lifted once and set down once. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Tap holes are drilled at the works, so nothing keeps the van waiting.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. A licensed shared house has fire-door and escape-route rules that decide how and when stone can be carried through the common parts. Work of that kind brings en-suites with it, and an en-suite vanity is a smaller piece again carrying exactly the same four operations. A repeated top is still drilled to the taps actually bought. Four kitchens ordered together take one template visit and one delivery, and that is where the saving comes from rather than from a discount on the stone. Where several bathrooms are done in one building the tops come off one slab run, because two greys from two batches sit badly on adjoining floors. A rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else.

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. That shape decides what is left on the slab when the kitchen has been cut, and what is left on the slab is where most vanity tops come from. The waste from a basin aperture is what a shelf is cut from. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. A vanity has no depth to lose, so where a kitchen run would take a ten millimetre scribe without noticing, a shallow top cannot spare it. The tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level. Confirm the block working hours and any porter sign-in, and have the plumber agree the waste position before we template. 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. Who is paying decides the material here more than anywhere else, because a vanity is small enough that an expensive stone stops being an expensive decision. A fixed changeover date leaves no room to redrill a top.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. A bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. The basin travels in the van with the top it belongs to.

Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The original kitchen was a small service room, so what is there now is a knock-through and the junction between the two floors is rarely level. Walls are thick, old and out of true, which means the vanity is scribed at both ends and the splash return is cut to follow the wall rather than to a straight line. A pod bathroom inside a shell has walls built last week.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. Small pieces are drawn onto the plan, never left to chance.

A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Loft en-suites arrive up the tightest flight in the house.