Kitchen worktops in Knightsbridge

Yes. Prime apartment stock with a main kitchen for show and a separate staff or prep kitchen behind it, both needing stone. The show kitchen is handleless with a large island and often a full-height stone splashback; the prep kitchen is a plain 3m run in the same material to keep continuity. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. A timed unload is planned into the rack before it leaves.

red-brick mansion block, prime new-build apartment and Victorian townhouse. Permitted works hours are commonly weekdays with a late start and an early finish, so a one-day fit is planned around the porter and the lift. The lift, if there is one, is a small passenger car with a gate, and the alternative is a stone stair winding round the shaft with a tight turn at every half-landing - so pieces get cut deliberately shorter than the slab allows and the kitchen is designed with more joins than it strictly needs. The bench proves it before the van moves.

Buildings run 24-hour security and a strict delivery protocol - vehicle booked in, ID for every fitter, protection down through the lobby and lift, and noisy works restricted to a defined window. Some buildings insist all cutting happens off site with zero exceptions. Once a long piece is in on the diagonal there is no room left for anyone else, so it travels up alone and is met on the landing above. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. It gets checked before the first piece is lifted.

Worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Consecutive days, one kitchen at a time. Nothing gets cut on site in these buildings, so the template must be dimensionally exact including appliance clearances - one wrong cut-out means a full replacement slab, not a rework.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Book-matched pieces are cut adjacent or not at all. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The notch is eased until it drops, then bonded. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

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 fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. A locked door costs the day, not an hour. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. Nothing gets buried behind something it has to follow off.

The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Two millimetres at the wall is two millimetres you see.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into them. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. 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. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. A recut loses the sequence for good.