Worktops 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. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. 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. What stands on the van is finished stone, not raw slab. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. 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. Long narrow rooms want a pale face at the working end. 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. 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. Reach across an unsupported span is a thickness question.

There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a landing. 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. Speckle forgives a joint that a sweeping figure never would. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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. Nothing about the shortlist is decided on the day itself.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is 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. 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. 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. 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.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. 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. The number follows the layout far more closely than the floor plan. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. Speckle hides the resin line a mitre leaves behind. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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. A chip in natural stone can be filled and polished in place.

The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. 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. 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 figured slab takes longer to match than a plain one.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. 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. 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. Short pieces are the argument for buying a slab outright.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. A run that sits under strong sun for hours every afternoon suits a surface built to be stable in daylight, because a resin-bound stone is made for indoor use and sustained sunlight is the one thing it was never designed around. Every notch is machined on the bench and none on site.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. Sintered stone at twelve millimetres weighs roughly half what thirty millimetre granite weighs, so a punishing route can genuinely rule one material in and another out. No colour and no edge is adjustable once a piece is machined.