Worktops in Hampstead Garden Suburb

Yes. Hampstead Garden Suburb is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW11, N2. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. 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. 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. Dust from a sintered slab belongs at the works, not on a street. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The staircase rises over the back room in a good number of these, so a sloping bulkhead sits over one end of the run and a piece cannot be stood on edge beneath it. The kitchen in one of these sits in the back addition and takes its daylight from one end, so the working half of the run is the darker half and a pale stone with a honed or matt face does more there than any colour with depth in it. Short pieces are the argument for buying a slab outright. 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. 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. The wall decides the scribe and the scribe decides the depth.

Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. 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. Thin sintered stone weighs about half what thick granite does. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. The offcut is yours if you want it and ours if you do not.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. A repeated specification is worth deciding slowly, once. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. 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. Drawing lengths and room lengths are rarely the same lengths.

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. A clean nest on the slab is the cheapest thing a shape can do. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. 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. Sealing suits stone that drinks; nothing else needs it. Send the run lengths, say where the sink and hob will sit, and tell us which way the room faces and what lighting is going in above the working run. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. Cleaning spray, not showroom light, should decide the finish.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. 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. An island is the piece that decides whether one slab covers the kitchen or two, and a second slab arrives as a step in the figure rather than a gentle slope. One slab or two is the biggest single jump in any quotation.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. Alcoves either side of the old breast chop the run into short lengths, and a kitchen made of short lengths is the case where buying a slab outright beats buying the square metres, because the remainder is paid for in both. A tall room carries a thick edge; a low one does not.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. Sintered surfaces are the hardest of the three to machine and the messiest to cut wet, which is precisely why none of that happens on a public pavement. A sealer needs a dry face and a quiet hour after it.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. Rooms in these houses run long and narrow with the only honest daylight at the garden end, so a pale honed surface does more for the working half of the kitchen than any colour with depth in it. Honed hides the dust an older house makes all year.