Reception counters and desks 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. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The tail lift needs pavement, not simply a space. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

These buildings have firm rules about what can be propped open, left in a lobby or carried through the residents entrance. The commercial work in a neighbourhood of new blocks is concierge desks and ground-floor fit-outs: a managed lobby needing a counter that works as a post point and a security position at once, or a shell unit turned into a dental practice or a clinic. A converted house wants a counter that reads as furniture. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. The front edge runs straight whatever the wall behind it does.

Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. A polished front edge travels facing inward, always. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Outside opening hours is usually when the kerb is free.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. What the operator needs at the shelf outranks the elevation. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. The knee recess is not a variable between sites.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Two planes, one drawing, one setting-out point. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

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. What a counter is scribed to is the joiner's carcass rather than the plaster, which is why it is templated after the carcass is fixed and never before. Where the plaster bows, the counter is drawn away from it. Send the lift car internal dimensions and the loading bay rules with the carcass dimensions, and have the operator mark where the payment terminal and cable grommets really go. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The same split runs through commercial property: a landlord fitting out a shell and a tenant fitting out their own reception want different things from one counter. Whoever holds the keys holds the fitting slot.

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 same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The room is square, the walls are plumb and the floor is flat, so almost every complication in the job belongs to the building rather than the kitchen. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. Apertures for cable and card reader are machined, never drilled in a lobby.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Plasterboard partitions mean light scribes and clean joins, and the fabrication effort moves to the visible faces instead. Two working surfaces at two heights, a return between them and clear knee space under the lower one: that is the shape almost every counter ends up being, whatever the front elevation promised. Every counter starts with the joiner finishing.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Whoever holds the lease usually holds the loading bay.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. 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 lobby was finished by the developer, so the counter is scribed to stone, terrazzo or a boarded wall somebody else laid, and that face is measured rather than assumed square. Old shopfronts were never sized for a three-metre top.