Splashbacks and upstands 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 shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Off the van last, and never in a hurry. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. Lath-and-plaster on the party wall and the chimney breast returns almost never runs true, so a 100mm upstand bedded on silicone is the honest answer here, it rides the bow and hides the junction the worktop can never close on its own. The wall build-up sets the depth of the return. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. It is usually what pushes a job towards a 100mm upstand instead of a full-height panel, because an upstand rides what a panel exposes. Scribe the top edge too or it stands off.

Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. Splashback panels are lighter than a worktop and far more awkward, because a tall thin piece has to be carried on edge and cannot be tilted to clear a turn. Full height goes in only where the way in allows full height. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. The crate exists for the walk from the van.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Plot spec panels are ordered by the plot, not the room. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. One conversion drawing repeats its mistakes six times.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. Upstands follow the return round the corner. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. A tall panel that fits at the worktop will stand off the wall at the top unless the wall is dubbed out or the panel is scribed. The sill caps the upstand before anything else does. The chimney breast recess must be replastered and fully dry, and the hob and extractor positions fixed, before anyone templates a full-height piece into it. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. The wall trade answers to a different budget.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Boxed pipework decides the panel width before taste does.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. Where the route is tight we break a long splashback at a natural vertical joint instead of forcing one panel through. Upstands make almost any turn a worktop will not.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. Upstands follow the run exactly, so every internal and external corner is a separate mitred or butted piece. The hob panel is sized after the extractor, not before.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Where the wall cannot be made good, setting the stone deliberately proud on a subframe with a shadow gap reads as a detail rather than a bad fit. A downstand sets the panel height, not the wall units.