Restaurant and cafe table tops in Mapesbury

Yes. Mapesbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW2, NW6. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Brent. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. A shared forecourt is booked rather than chanced. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Windows are low and wide with deep timber cills and leaded lights, so a run under one meets joinery rather than plaster. Hospitality in an area like this is usually a converted house or an old inn, so the dining space is several small rooms rather than one, and each room takes a different table size. The room is handed back laid up, whatever the building. 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. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. Radiators and rails cap the depth of a two-seat piece.

A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. Larger diameters go in early, while the floor is still clear. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. Where the van cannot wait, the room has to be ready.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. The count is agreed before the slab is committed. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. Lead time is the reason the date is set early.

An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. Two-seaters and four-seaters come off one slab run. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. An awkward corner takes a made shape. Send a plan of each room with its table sizes against it, and say which covers are outdoors so the material can be split before anything is priced. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. Consistency across sites is a decision, not an accident.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. A lift takes a loaded frame or it takes nothing.

Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. Feet are wound out where the floor falls away.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. A steel goes in where the original back wall came out, and the ceiling steps down under it at the point the run passes beneath. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Chosen for service, not for the photographs on opening night.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. The count per slab is worked before a figure is given.