Reception counters and desks 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. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Where the bay is booked by the hour, pieces come off in fitting order. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Inter-war purpose-built blocks have curved external walls and steel windows, so a run along an outside wall is following a genuine curve rather than a bow. A block of this age carries a porter's desk in the entrance hall, and that hall is usually a protected interior with panelling, an original floor and finishes nobody is allowed to fix into. The service road at the back is often the real way in. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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. The public face is the face that has to be right.

The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. 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. A join forced by a doorway still lands over a carcass support. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. The transaction shelf can wait on the van; the counter cannot.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. Rooms in a shared house are let individually, so the work has to be done around whoever is still living in the building. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. A counter in a working building is an evening job. A landlord ordering several kitchens at once is buying a specification once and then repeating it, so the early decisions are worth taking slowly. 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. One visit, because a lobby cannot be closed twice.

A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Where the front curves, the shelf below it curves with it. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A counter set to the wall instead of to itself will show it. Measure the lift car internally, photograph the stair turn and the hall, and confirm with the managing agent what may and may not be fixed into. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. A packer belongs under the joinery, never under the counter.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. These blocks were built with a lift from new, which will usually take a worktop and almost never takes a full-length island piece. That makes the counter a freestanding thing on its own carcass, drawn to clear the skirting rather than to sit against it, with the fixings agreed before the drawing is finished. A pharmacy counter is two heights before anybody draws it.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. 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 knee recess makes any twist in the carcass visible, since a shelf with nothing beneath it has nowhere for a packer to go. What the joiner left behind is what the templater records.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. 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. Blocks of this age carry a porter's desk in the entrance hall, and that hall is usually a protected interior where nothing may be fixed into the original finishes. Marketing suites get a permanent counter for a temporary lobby.