Kitchen worktops in Hurlingham

Yes. The largest houses in Fulham sit here, and the kitchens reflect it - separate prep and pantry areas, a main island of 3-3.6m, an additional run of 4m and often a stone-topped bar or serving unit. Clients regularly ask for a continuous vein match from island to full-height rear panel, which means selecting consecutive slabs from the same block and dry-laying at the yard. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Loaded for the carry, not for the van.

large detached and semi-detached Victorian house, Edwardian villa, riverside apartment block and gated modern house. Edwardian terraces are wider and taller than the Victorian houses next to them, so the kitchen usually takes a full-width rear room rather than a narrow outrigger. The galley run down a side-return usually measures longer than a slab will give us, so a join is designed in from the start and nested to land over a cabinet gable rather than wherever the material happens to run out. A scribe of twenty millimetres is machined, not fettled on site.

Driveways and off-street parking are common, which is a rarity in the borough and makes the unload easy, but the houses are deep with long hallways and the kitchen is often the far room past two doorways. Some properties back onto the riverside path or club land with no vehicle access at the rear, so the front route is the only one. The hall is the only way in and out for whoever lives there, so it is cleared and then kept clear for as long as pieces are moving. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. A piece is stood on end only where there is room to turn it.

Worktop fabrication and worktop installation, 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. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Fire doors stay shut, so the carry route is longer. Vein-matched book-matched work means the slab selection meeting comes first - once the block is cut you cannot recover a mismatched island end.

Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The saw follows the nest, not the floor plan. 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. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Two millimetres at the wall is two millimetres you see. Supply only, material begins at £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on separate lines rather than as one number.

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 fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Booked around the tenant, not around the owner. Describe the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the schedule rather than met on the day.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Book-matched pieces are cut adjacent or not at all.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. A recut loses the sequence for good.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. The rear extension is frequently original rather than added, which means it is solidly built and just as far out of square as the rest of the house. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. Older houses come off the bench with longer scribes.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Where the turn inside is tight the piece gets turned on the path and brought in already on edge, which needs room in front of the door as well as behind it. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. The opening is measured on the diagonal, not across the frame.