Restaurant and cafe table tops 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. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. The bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. What the unit was before decides what it needs now. 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. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. A rocking table is a floor problem and not a stone one.

Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. Wrapping stays on until the pedestal is standing. 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. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Somewhere to stand the frames matters more than the distance.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop design & quotation and worktop installation. 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. 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. A room opening in a second phase is worth naming now, while the material is still on the ground and a match is a telephone call. Repeat work is quoted against the original, not from scratch. 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 an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. Fit-out dates are worked backwards from the opening.

Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. A circle wastes its corners, and the quote says so. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. The gangway is a measurement rather than an impression. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. Who pays and who approves are worth naming early.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. Frontage, gangway and covers, in that order.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. What decides the cut list here is the seating plan rather than the room shape, and one repeated table size nests far better than six one-offs. Rectangles nest and rounds do not.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. The commercial frontage on streets like these is a narrow shop with the dining room running back from the pavement, so the tops go in past furniture that is already down. Covers decide the count, and the count decides the order.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. Two hands to a piece, however light it looks.