Restaurant and cafe table 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. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Deliveries land before the doors open wherever possible. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A riverside block is a managed building with a booked goods lift, a loading bay and a concierge, and all three have to line up on the same day. The commercial space in a new block is a ground-floor unit with a service bay or a loading door behind it, and that is the most straightforward delivery a table order gets: a level threshold, a flat floor and a goods lift where the unit runs over more than one level. Chair backs do more damage than plates ever do. 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. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. Room by room, since no two of them are the same.

Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. A trolley run across a forecourt gets boarded like any other. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. Where the standing is short the pieces are counted off at the tail lift against the plan rather than checked once they are already inside. The plan on the van matches the plan on the floor.

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. 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. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. The bases usually stay and only the pieces change. 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. 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. A refit is a resurface where the pedestals are sound.

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 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. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

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. 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. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall. Send the fit-out drawing with final table positions and sizes, the base specification, and the delivery window the managing agent is prepared to accept. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Underfloor heating in a screed rules out fixing into the floor and rules out standing anything heavy on a single point. 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. The stone is straightforward and the base fixing is the job.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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. Levelled at the feet, never packed under the stone.

The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. Say what you have and where it came from before anything is booked, because thickness and batch decide what can be done with it. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. 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. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room.

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. Floor-to-ceiling glazing lights the worktop from one side all day, which shows every ripple in a polished surface and every gap at a scribe. The complication is the programme rather than the building. Old floors fall away and the feet take it up.