Kitchen worktops in Hoxton

Yes. Georgian houses around the squares with small compartmented rooms, large post-war estates with standard galley kitchens, and a few converted industrial buildings with open-plan runs. Most of the work is replacement within the existing footprint rather than reconfiguration. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. Nothing goes out until the route back to the van is clear.

Georgian terrace, Victorian terrace, large post-war estate and warehouse conversion. Where the kitchen is on the entrance level, the piece comes off the deck and turns straight in without going up or down at all. The carry is the constraint. Settlement is packed out, never levered out.

Estate courtyards with bollards, filtered residential streets, red route sections on the A10 edge and restrictions on Old Street to the south. Estate blocks have small lifts and long deck-access walkways to cross before you reach the door. A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Nothing is carried past an obstruction that could have been moved.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. 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. Wipe-down beats sealed grout on a turnaround. Deck-access blocks mean a long exposed carry along an open walkway, so weather matters here in a way it does not elsewhere, and a slab on edge in a gust four floors up is the risk to design out.

A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Nothing is cut on site if the bench can do it. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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. The obstruction breaks the length, every time. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Booked around the tenant, not around the owner. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. A galley is levelled as one plane, both sides together.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. The last piece in has the least tolerance left.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The ceiling is a concrete soffit with a skim on it, so there is nothing to fix into overhead and no void to hide anything in. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. The whole run is dry-fitted before any adhesive is opened.

Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. A service duct runs between the kitchen and the bathroom stacked above it, and access to that duct stays open whatever the layout does. Deck access or a single narrow staircase with tight half-landings means long pieces get walked up on edge, and the landing turn is checked before we commit. A dry-lined wall hides a void, and the void gets bridged.