Reception counters and desks in Holland Park

Yes. Holland Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W11, W14. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

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 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. Old shopfronts were never sized for a three-metre top. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 shadow gap solves what a scribe cannot.

A short run of external steps before the communal door means a piece is lifted twice before the staircase proper has even started. 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. Revolving doors get measured rather than assumed. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Apertures change from desk to desk, so each drawing is its own. 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. 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. A weekend fit is planned as a weekend fit from the outset.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Yield on a counter is lost in the returns, not in the length. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the 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. The knee recess is checked for square before the shelf is cut. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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 porter's desk is specified to outlast the porter.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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 curved front is a waterjet job and a carcass problem both.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. 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. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. A counter piece walked in on edge needs the headroom checked too.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. 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. That entrance is what caps the counter, because a shopfront door and the step in front of it will take far less than a full-length top, so the run is broken over a support in the carcass rather than gambled on. The service road at the back is often the real way in.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. The closet wing is a narrow projection at the back with windows on two sides, which leaves very little continuous wall for a run. A front room converted into a surgery or a salon gives a small lobby and a counter that still has to leave width for people to get past it. A pharmacy counter is two heights before anybody draws it.