Worktop fabrication 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. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. A timed unload is planned into the rack before it leaves. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

These blocks were built with a lift from new, which will usually take a worktop and almost never takes a full-length island piece. The lift, if there is one, is a small passenger car with a gate, and the alternative is a stone stair winding round the shaft with a tight turn at every half-landing - so pieces get cut deliberately shorter than the slab allows and the kitchen is designed with more joins than it strictly needs. What the shell demands is solved in the shop, not the kitchen. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Machined to the real line.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. A remake is the price of guessing that measurement. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Nothing gets buried behind something it has to follow off.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. A landlord ordering several kitchens at once is buying a specification once and then repeating it, so the early decisions are worth taking slowly. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. A batch split across two weeks stops being a batch. Shared-house kitchens take heavier use from more people than a family kitchen does, and the surface gets chosen on that basis rather than on looks. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Matched means the same block, not the same name.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Cut-outs are machined with the piece bedded down. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Cut oversize on purpose, every time. Access arrangements and the porter's permitted hours need confirming before we cut, because the agreed piece size is what the nesting is built around. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. We check who is entitled to approve it.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Nothing changes hands until after the template. This is a logistics job before it is a stone job, and the lift car is usually the single biggest constraint on the design. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. The saw only ever sees the templated dimensions.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Thick external walls, deep window reveals and boxed risers mean the runs are templated to what is there rather than to a rectangle. The workshop works to the template drawing and to the measured route, in that order. A piece that needs trimming later was drawn wrong.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. Crates are sized to clear the same openings the stone does.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. Apron mitres are bonded and polished before dispatch.