Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Knightsbridge

Yes. Knightsbridge is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW1X. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. A vanity fit is a short visit with one or two pieces in it, so the van stands only for as long as it takes to walk them in. One trip in with the top, the shelves and the adhesive. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The kitchen was a service room at the back of the flat, so it is a long way from the front door along a corridor with two turns in it. A bathroom in a block like this was usually carved out of a larger room, so the proportions are odd, the ceiling is high and the window reveals are deep enough to be worth cutting in stone. High ceilings do nothing for a vanity, but the reveals do. 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. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A vanity has no depth to give away to a scribe.

Where only one car serves the building a breakdown on the morning halts the job outright, so the fallback route is worked out at template rather than on the landing. A vanity is the one piece of stone that route will not usually defeat, because a top cut to a standard unit depth weighs what one person can manage. A double vanity is a worktop as far as the carry is concerned. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The van waits while a kitchen goes in, not while a basin does.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Where several bathrooms are done in one building the tops come off one slab run, because two greys from two batches sit badly on adjoining floors. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. A house divided into flats needs a vanity for each of them, and small repeated pieces are the one case where buying a whole slab makes sense. The bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone.

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 bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. What the kitchen cannot use, the vanity usually can. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. A vanity has no depth to lose, so where a kitchen run would take a ten millimetre scribe without noticing, a shallow top cannot spare it. The unit is packed level before the top goes near it. Confirm the block working hours and any porter sign-in, and have the plumber agree the waste position before we template. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A let bathroom wants quartz for the same reason a let kitchen does: nothing to seal, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be briefed on. The stone outlasts the unit under it, whoever owns the flat.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. This is a logistics job before it is a stone job, and the lift car is usually the single biggest constraint on the design. What that does to a vanity is push the whole job into a narrow depth, because a bathroom takes the same stone as a kitchen in about two thirds of the width. It is the smallest piece we cut and the most crowded.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. 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 the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. A bathroom slot is booked short and kept short.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A car that answers every floor button pressed while a piece is standing in it needs to be held on the key, and the key usually lives at a desk that wants notice. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. The landing turn matters more than the front door for a bathroom.