Reception counters and desks in Lower Clapton

Yes. Lower Clapton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E5. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Service yards want a name and a time, given a week out. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The flat entrance door and the internal doorways are usually tighter than the communal stairs, which is the opposite of what most people assume. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Concierge desks work as a post room and a security point at once. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. A bowed lobby wall is a scribe, and a scribe takes hours.

There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a landing. 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. Nothing is carried through a reception still taking visitors. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. The counter is unwrapped inside the building, never at the kerb.

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 replacement and worktop installation. 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. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. One visit, because a lobby cannot be closed twice. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. One counter, one drawing, and no second bite at it.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Yield on a counter is lost in the returns, not in the length. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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 counter is scribed to the carcass, and the carcass to the floor. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The same split runs through commercial property: a landlord fitting out a shell and a tenant fitting out their own reception want different things from one counter. The counter stays when the tenant goes, and is chosen accordingly.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. A curved front is a waterjet job and a carcass problem both.

Nothing is payable in advance of the template. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Chimney breasts are often taken out at ground level and left standing above, so the middle of the run is newer wall than the two ends of it. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. Reception work is quiet work, done to a building already open.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. An under-stairs cupboard eats one end of most of these kitchens, and the run stops at a door that has to keep opening. Two working surfaces at two heights, a return between them and clear knee space under the lower one: that is the shape almost every counter ends up being, whatever the front elevation promised. The height that matters most is the low one.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Cornice, picture rails and deep skirting survive in converted rooms, so the run stands off the wall and the back edge follows the units rather than the plaster. That entrance is what caps the counter, because a shopfront door and the step in front of it will take far less than a full-length top, so the run is broken over a support in the carcass rather than gambled on. A stair off the pavement caps what can be turned onto the landing.