Kitchen worktops in Fulham Reach

Yes. Developer kitchens throughout, so you are usually working to a fixed footprint - a run of 3-3.6m against a service wall plus an island of around 2.2m, all sitting over pre-routed services that cannot move. Upgrades from the original composite tops to full-slab quartz or Dekton are the bread and butter, and the sink cut-out has to match the existing undermount position exactly. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew.

2010s riverside apartment block, wharf and distillery site redevelopment, concierge tower and riverside townhouse. Boxed soil stacks and ventilation ducts run behind the units, and the boxing depth changes between floor level and worktop height. New-build rooms are genuinely square, but they are dot-and-dab plasterboard, and the taped internal angle is where it goes wrong - the board bellies at the corner and the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn.

Managed estate with a concierge desk, contractor sign-in, insurance checks and a booked goods lift that has to be protected before use. There is a basement car park with a height barrier and a loading bay, and once out of the lift the corridors are long and carpeted, so boards go down before anything is wheeled. The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation, in that order. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. Units fitted, fixed and level first. Everything is fixed by the developer's services, so this is a precision replacement job - measure the existing undermount and drainage grooves, do not redesign them.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Carcasses have to be sound first. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

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 template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. No stone is cut from a plan. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.