Reception counters and desks in Highgate

Yes. Highgate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N6, N19. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. 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. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Service yards want a name and a time, given a week out. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Ceiling beams cross the room at a height that decides where a piece can be stood on edge and where it cannot. What is wanted there is a counter reading as furniture rather than as a shop fitting, which puts the edge profile, the returns and the finish on the back of the counter under real scrutiny. Public counters are specified for wear at the front edge. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. 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. A counter set to the wall instead of to itself will show it.

A car will often hold more than its doors will admit, and it is the clear width between the door edges that a piece actually has to pass through. 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. Trestles go up in the lobby before anything is unwrapped. On a drive that only takes one vehicle nose-in, the van has to reverse the whole length of it to get back out, which decides which way it goes in. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. The counter is unwrapped inside the building, never at the kerb.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. The counter is the last trade in and the first thing judged. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Apertures change from desk to desk, so each drawing is its own.

The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. A counter join lines up with the plane above it or it gets moved. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. A packer belongs under the joinery, never under the counter. Confirm the edge profile and which faces receive it, and tell us whether a screen, hatch or gate forms part of the counter before the carcass is built. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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. Whoever signs it inherits the join positions with it.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Wide doors, generous rooms and somewhere to park mean the joins that go in are the ones we choose, not the ones the building forces. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. Stone on a joinery carcass wants that carcass square first.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The floor is often flags or brick laid straight on the ground, so it is solid, uneven and not going to be levelled by chasing into it. Large houses in these streets are converted into clinics, nurseries and small offices, and the reception ends up in a hall that was never meant to hold a desk. A converted front room gives a lobby with no depth to 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. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. What the joiner left behind is what the templater records.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. These have been added to over two centuries, so the kitchen is made of two or three walls of different ages and different thicknesses. A private clinic in a converted house wants a counter reading as furniture rather than as a shop fitting, which puts the edge profile and the returns under scrutiny. Goods lifts in old warehouses take longer pieces than most buildings.