Reception counters and desks in King's Cross

Yes. King's Cross is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1C, N1, NW1. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The tail lift needs pavement, not simply a space. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Access is a question about the plot rather than the house: a narrow frontage between older buildings with nowhere obvious to stand a van. The lobby was finished by the developer, so the counter is scribed to stone, terrazzo or a boarded wall somebody else laid, and that face is measured rather than assumed square. A shopfront door caps the counter length before the slab does. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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.

Blankets on the walls and a board on the floor go in before the first piece, because a scratched car becomes a bill from the managing agent long after the kitchen is finished. 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. Revolving doors get measured rather than assumed. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Outside opening hours is usually when the kerb is free.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop fabrication 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. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. The knee recess is not a variable between sites. 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. 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. A counter in a working building is an evening job.

A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. Two planes, one drawing, one setting-out point. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. The public face is the face that has to be right. Send the lift car internal dimensions and the loading bay rules with the carcass dimensions, and have the operator mark where the payment terminal and cable grommets really go. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. Where a managing agent has to approve the work, the drawing goes out in a form they can sign without ever standing in the lobby. Dilapidations decide more counter specifications than taste does.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Block and beam floors with blockwork walls are true enough that the scribes are light and the joins can be pulled tight. A neighbourhood of new blocks means concierge desks: a managed lobby with a counter working as a post point and a security position at the same time. A porter's desk stands on its own carcass, fixed into nothing original.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. A counter set to the wall instead of to itself will show it.

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. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. The knee recess makes any twist in the carcass visible, since a shelf with nothing beneath it has nowhere for a packer to go. A packer belongs under the joinery, never under the counter.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Infill plots usually put the kitchen at the back with wide doors to a small garden, and that opening is the best route in. Ground-floor units in these developments arrive as shells and get fitted out as clinics and surgeries, where the transaction shelf carries a card reader and a screen. Public counters are specified for wear at the front edge.