Reception counters and desks in Hampstead

Yes. Hampstead 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. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The transaction shelf can wait on the van; the counter cannot. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Where the hall is tall, the light finds every seam in the counter. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. The knee recess is checked for square before the shelf is cut.

Timber nosings chip under a slipped edge, so the treads are covered along the whole flight rather than only at the landings. 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. The transaction shelf goes almost anywhere the upper top will not. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Nothing is stood anywhere on a pavement it could be knocked from.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop design & quotation 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. One counter, one drawing, and no second bite at it. 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. 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. Several desks off one slab run, or they will not match.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. The return between the two levels is drawn first and cut first. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. Two levels means two datums, and they are reconciled on paper. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. 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. A short lease buys a different counter from a long one.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. 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. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The public face is the face that has to be right.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. 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. An external corner on a counter is seen from both sides at once, so it is mitred rather than butted and the pattern is carried round it. A counter join lines up with the plane above it or it gets moved.

There is nothing to pay before the template visit. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Chimney breasts and the alcoves either side of them break the run into short pieces before anyone has drawn a kitchen. Two working surfaces at two heights, a return between them and clear knee space under the lower one: that is the shape almost every counter ends up being, whatever the front elevation promised. A counter is measured in the lobby it will stand in.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. Where the front is curved the top is cut on a waterjet, and the carcass has to be built to the same radius rather than close to it. Yield on a counter is lost in the returns, not in the length.