Kitchen worktops in Harrow on the Hill

Yes. Old, tall houses on the hill with kitchens in semi-basements or narrow rear rooms, low ceilings, uneven floors and original openings that cannot be altered. Bespoke in-frame joinery is common and the stone is usually honed rather than polished to suit the period, with runs of only 2.4m to 3m broken by structural walls. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The yard reads the access note before it racks anything.

Georgian and early Victorian townhouse, late Victorian villa and school-related listed buildings. A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. Pieces are sized to the tightest turn on the route before anything is nested to the slab. What the shell demands is solved in the shop, not the kitchen.

The steepest and narrowest approach in the borough: single-track sections, no pavement in places, resident-only parking and houses set above the road behind steps. A long uphill carry from wherever the van can legally stop is the normal expectation. A tiled hall floor takes a dropped corner badly, so boards go down over the tiles before anything comes through the door. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Nothing leaves the bench longer than the way in allows.

Worktop fabrication, in that order. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. One setout, eight identical tops. Nothing here is level or square, so allow scribing on every edge and expect to shim the units before the template rather than after.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Seams land over gables, never over a void. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Oversize on the scribe edge, always. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Cutouts are checked against the actual appliances, whoever bought them. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The radius goes in at the bench, not on site.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The closet wing is a narrow projection at the back with windows on two sides, which leaves very little continuous wall for a run. Joins land over a cabinet gable and clear of every cut-out, because the alternative is a bridge of stone that will not survive the carry. Settled on the drawing, cut once.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. A remake is the price of guessing that measurement.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. A scribed end into an alcove is cut long on the bench and eased back on site, since the alcove is never the same width top and bottom. The bench proves it before the van moves.