Restaurant and cafe table tops in Hyde Park Estate

Yes. Hyde Park Estate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W2. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. The plan on the van matches the plan on the floor. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

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. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. A narrow frontage is a small diameter, honestly stated. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. A column in the room is designed around, not cut around.

Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. A trolley run across a forecourt gets boarded like any other. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A long push from the kerb is planned, not discovered.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is 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. A room opening in a second phase is worth naming now, while the material is still on the ground and a match is a telephone call. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room. 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 changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. Buying twice costs more than buying deep once.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. The count per slab is worked before a figure is given. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. Banquette seating wants a cantilever foot under it. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. A lease term is a fair reason to specify differently.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The kitchen normally sits in the back addition or a later side return, which puts the run against the oldest and least straight wall in the building. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Outdoor covers take a different stone from indoor ones.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. Corners eased, since chair backs find them first.

Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. A rocking table is a floor problem and not a stone one.

The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Say what you have and where it came from before anything is booked, because thickness and batch decide what can be done with it. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. A fit-out programme runs to an opening date that does not move, so the sizes are frozen and the slab committed earlier than most jobs need. A phased opening is planned as a single order.