Worktop fabrication in Kensington

Yes. Kensington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W8. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of the borough. 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. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. A long walk from the van earns heavier corner protection. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. 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. The bench proves it before the van moves. 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. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. The radius goes in at the bench, not on site.

The lift is only part of the route, and the corridor from the lobby to the flat door often holds a tighter turn than the car does. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The drawing states a maximum length and the shop honours it. 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. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. The frame is filled back to front when the bay is booked short.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. The batch stays together to the crate. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Reorderable later, or not specified.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. 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. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. A deep relief needs material left behind it. The sink and hob need to be on site and the run layout fixed before we start cutting, because moving a hob after the join position is set means recutting the whole piece. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. An agent forwarding a drawing is not approving it.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. The notch is machined, never ground in later.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Lower ground floor kitchens are reached by a stair with a winder in it, and the head height over that winder is lower than the room at either end. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. The offcut is planned before the main piece is cut.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. 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. Joins land over a cabinet gable and clear of every cut-out, because the alternative is a bridge of stone that will not survive the carry. Every join over a gable, clear of every cut-out.

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. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. Book-matched pieces are cut adjacent or not at all.