Knight's Hill worktops
The kitchens we meet in Knight's Hill
The useful questions about worktop jobs in Knight's Hill are really questions about the kitchen itself, which is where any sensible answer has to start. A mix of interwar semis with rear kitchens that get modest extensions and postwar estate flats with fixed compact layouts, so the same street can produce a 4m island kitchen and a 2.2m galley. Landlord and housing-association refits with standard carcasses make up a steady share of the work. Plenty of kitchens do not match either description exactly, which is what the measured survey is there to sort out.
Ceilings are generous and the rooms are narrow, so the runs are long, the aisle is tight and there is nowhere to stand a slab on edge. The surface is where the money actually moves: across the 185 surfaces we list the median is £224 per square metre, and half of them sit between £165 and £300. A week with a sample on the units beats an hour in a showroom.
Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. A matt or honed face suits a period room better than a mirror polish, and it is also the finish that hides the fine dust an old house produces all year round. At four metres a stone is a tone rather than a pattern.
What we are cutting for, here, is Interwar semi, Postwar estate housing, Victorian terrace and 1970s low-rise flat. Each of those puts the services somewhere else, and the cut-outs follow.
