Reception counters and desks in Kentish Town

Yes. Kentish Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW5. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. A height barrier rules out the tail lift before it rules out anything else. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The step down from the main house into the addition is commonly a hundred to a hundred and fifty millimetres, which gives the kitchen a different floor datum from the rest of the ground floor. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Marketing suites get a permanent counter for a temporary lobby. 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. 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. Two levels means two datums, and they are reconciled on paper.

Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. The counter is the last thing in and the first thing looked at. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Service yards want a name and a time, given a week out.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and 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 new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. A repeatable counter needs a repeatable material. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Fit-out programmes slip toward the counter, never away from it.

A single long run down one side puts every cut-out in one piece, so the sink, the hob and any drainer grooves all take material out of the same length. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Shelf depth is set by the knee space underneath it. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The public face is the face that has to be right. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. 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. 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.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Ground floors fall away towards the garden across the whole footprint, so the units are packed up long before anything is measured for stone. 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. Stone on a joinery carcass wants that carcass square first.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. 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. Working out of hours costs less than a chipped counter does.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A galley run down a side-return extension usually measures longer than a slab will give in one length, so a join is designed in from the start rather than discovered. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. The longest piece is decided before the shape is finalised.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. 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. Where the addition is single storey the ceiling follows a lean-to roof, so one side of the room loses height and a full-height panel has a sloping stop. That entrance is what caps the counter, because a shopfront door and the step in front of it will take far less than a full-length top, so the run is broken over a support in the carcass rather than gambled on. Concierge desks work as a post room and a security point at once.