Restaurant and cafe table tops 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 permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. A clock on the kerb changes the order of unloading. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

The original scullery gully is still live in the yard outside the back door, and new waste from the sink joins a drain laid for a copper and a stone sink. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. A high ceiling wants a thicker edge under it. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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. A pedestal is checked for spread before a size is agreed.

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 table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. Nothing is carried past a chair still in the gangway. Where the household has used up the visitor permits it gets for the year, the remaining options are a suspension or a paid bay and both belong on the quote. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Counted off at the tail lift where the standing is short.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. Buying twice costs more than buying deep once. 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. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. A phased opening is planned as a single order.

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. 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. Offcuts from a counter become the smaller pieces. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. 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. A column in the room is designed around, not cut around. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. 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. Whoever signs off is agreed before machining starts.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. 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. 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. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Banquette seating wants a cantilever foot under it.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. Long hours push the choice towards a harder face.

Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Nothing is payable in advance of the template. A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. 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. Outdoor covers take a different stone from indoor ones.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. What decides the cut list here is the seating plan rather than the room shape, and one repeated table size nests far better than six one-offs. A set is laid out together before anything is wrapped.