Stone bar tops in Imperial Wharf

Yes. Imperial Wharf is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen usually sits along the internal spine of the plan with the glazing at the far end, so the run itself has no window and no daylight on it. The carcasses are thin cam-lock boxes that will not take a leaning load on their own, so flat steel is let into them flush with the top of the frame before any stone goes on, rather than corbels being screwed to the front afterwards. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. A bar top is levelled to itself rather than to what it stands on, so the packing goes into the frame and the stools take up whatever the floor is doing. The bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor.

Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. That matters more on a bar than on a run, because a join forced by the way in cannot be allowed to land in the unsupported part of the nose. Cellar bars go down a flight, which is the harder direction. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. That has to cover more than the unload, since the corbels, the flat bar and the fixings all come off the van well before the top does. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. 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. Housings and integrated appliances are set out for a 38mm laminate top, so dropping to 20mm or 30mm stone changes the clearances and needs checking before anything is cut. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. A bar laid over that is a second level rather than a wider one, so it wants a spine underneath it and a settled detail where the two heights meet. The stool positions go on the drawing before the join does. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. Where the nose has to be carried past something fixed the support moves rather than the stone, since a corbel landing in the knee space is worse than no corbel at all. A notch in a bar top is drawn with its support beside it. Send the peninsula dimensions including how far the top is meant to project, the stool count, and the internal dimensions of the service lift. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. A home bar is discretionary work, so the edge profile, the corbel detail and the radius on the nose are worth settling properly rather than defaulting to whatever is quickest. Stools change; the nose does not.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. A flush bar is one plane and twice the overhang problem.

Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Nothing is payable in advance of the template. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The kitchen is usually part of the living space, so three edges are read from a sofa rather than from standing height at the sink. A bar top put into a room like that is an overhang question first, because the nose has to carry people leaning on it long after the slab has stopped being interesting. A bar top is judged from a stool, not from the doorway.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. These flats are built with a floating floor over a concrete slab for acoustic reasons, and it deflects slightly under the weight of a stone island. What gets called a bar in a flat like this is usually the end of a peninsula with stools pushed under it, and the overhang was drawn long before anyone worked out what carries it. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up.

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 balcony door is the only other opening in the flat and it leads nowhere useful, so everything comes in through the front door. The carcasses are thin cam-lock boxes, so flat steel is let into them before the stone goes on rather than corbels being screwed to the front of them afterwards. Deep skirtings push the frame forward and the top covers it.