Reception counters and desks in Golders Green

Yes. Golders Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW11. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Where the bay is booked by the hour, pieces come off in fitting order. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen was a service room at the back of the flat, so it is a long way from the front door along a corridor with two turns in it. 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 lobby was finished by somebody else, and the counter joins it. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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. Stone will not straighten joinery, and it will not forgive it either.

The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. The upper counter is the piece that has to make the turn. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. The transaction shelf can wait on the van; the counter cannot.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Repeat receptions are worth settling once and then leaving alone. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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. On a fit-out counter the date is half the decision.

Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A curved front is a waterjet job and a carcass problem both. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The front edge runs straight whatever the wall behind it does. 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. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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. Approval in writing before a slab is committed to a desk.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Thick external walls, deep window reveals and boxed risers mean the runs are templated to what is there rather than to a rectangle. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. Two heights and a return, settled before any stone is cut.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. External corners on a counter are mitred, never butted.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Permitted working hours, a porter and a booked lift set a hard finish time on the day whatever stage the fit has reached. What decides the piece sizes is the lobby and the way into it, since a counter top runs longer than a kitchen worktop and has no cabinet run to break it up. The knee recess is a dimension, not a styling note.

It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Walls are solid brick with lime plaster and a hard skim over the top, and that skim comes away in sheets when old tiles are taken back. 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 parade unit is entered up a step nobody thought to measure.