Reception counters and desks in Kew

Yes. Kew is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW9. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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 addition is a brick narrower than the house it hangs off, which leaves a stub of the original rear wall standing square to the run at the doorway end. 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. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. What the joiner left behind is what the templater records.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. A counter piece walked in on edge needs the headroom checked too. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. 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.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. A fit-out programme puts the counter last, behind the joiner and the electrician, which is exactly when the least time is left to template it. Fit-out programmes slip toward the counter, never away from it.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A curved front is a waterjet job and a carcass problem both. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A bowed lobby wall is a scribe, and a scribe takes hours. 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. 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. 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.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. Where the floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. The counter is scribed to the carcass, and the carcass to the floor.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. External corners on a counter are mitred, never butted.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. A suspension only works if the cones and the notice are actually there on the morning, and now and then a car is sitting in the bay regardless. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. The counter is unwrapped inside the building, never at the kerb.

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. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. The lean-to roof drains into a valley gutter against the addition next door, and a long leak there shows at the head of the kitchen wall rather than on the ceiling. 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.