Worktops 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 the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. Whatever the standing allows, the stone leaves that van finished, because every edge, cut-out and internal radius is machined at the works and none of it is open to reconsideration at the kerb. Stone arrives finished, because a kerb is not a polishing shop. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Floors are concrete with a screed and a thin finish, so there is no give anywhere and packing the carcasses is the only way to get a plane. The kitchen in one of these flats is often internal or single-aspect, and in a room that never gets direct light a pale face with a soft finish is worth more than any amount of colour. Open-plan surfaces are furniture before they are work surfaces. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. Every notch and every scribe is machined into the piece before it leaves the works, and a hard sintered surface is the least forgiving of a tight internal corner, so one is always cut with a generous radius. Movement in a stone needs length to read as anything at all.

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. That caps the longest piece, and a run split into two lengths nests differently on the slab, which moves the yield and moves the figure with it. Thinner stone carries easily and asks for continuous support. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. A granite kitchen ends its day with a sealer, and a sealer wants a dry face and a quiet hour afterwards, so that hour is written into the day rather than borrowed from it. A natural surface is sealed at the end of its own fitting day.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Rooms in a shared house are let individually, so the work has to be done around whoever is still living in the building. Where several kitchens are ordered together the sensible move is to take them all off one batch, because two slabs of the same name bought six months apart will not sit happily in the same building. Where tenants change often, a surface with nothing to seal wins. A landlord ordering several kitchens at once is buying a specification once and then repeating it, so the early decisions are worth taking slowly. Volume work tends to live at the entry end of the range, and the entry end is genuine stone rather than a compromise, since the lowest supply figure we quote is a sintered surface and not a thin laminate pretending to be one. Heavy daily cooking is an argument for natural stone.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. A shape like that nests kindly on a slab, so more of what gets bought ends up on the units and the rate per square metre behaves much as the brochure says it will. The number follows the layout far more closely than the floor plan. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. A hob dropped into the middle of a length puts sustained warmth at the lip of a cut-out, and an engineered surface will yellow there across ten years where a natural one takes it without comment. A tight inside corner is where brittle material gives up. Tell us the longest piece that will reach the flat, the run lengths, and whether the kitchen has any daylight at all or is lit entirely from the ceiling. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. That changes which questions are worth asking about the stone, because somebody staying put wants to know how a honed face marks in five years and somebody selling wants to know how it photographs next spring. The next household inherits the stone and not the taste.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Steel windows sit in narrow reveals with a slim cill, which leaves almost no depth for an upstand to return into. The joinery around it is deep and period, so a substantial thickness with a simple profile sits beside it far better than a slim modern edge does. True walls and standard carcasses give the best yield there is.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. 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. These kitchens are often internal or single-aspect, and in a room short of daylight a pale face with a soft finish is worth more than any amount of colour. A kitchen with no window of its own needs tone rather than colour.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. 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 run that sits under strong sun for hours every afternoon suits a surface built to be stable in daylight, because a resin-bound stone is made for indoor use and sustained sunlight is the one thing it was never designed around. The wall decides the scribe and the scribe decides the depth.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. 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. A deep scribe eats into the back of the piece, which is quietly important on a stone with directional figure, since the pattern moves backwards as that depth comes off. Sealing suits stone that drinks; nothing else needs it.