Kitchen worktops in Marylebone

Yes. Mansion flats dominate, and the classic job is a tired 1980s kitchen in a large flat being replaced with a handleless design in the same footprint - a 3.5m run along the old service wall plus a short island where the maid's room used to be. Estate leases mean layout changes need landlord approval, so the layout usually stays. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

Georgian estate townhouse, Edwardian mansion block and medical-building conversion. External walls are thick and the run under the window sits in a deep reveal that has to be templated rather than assumed square. The lift car is usually too short and too low to take a full-length piece flat or on edge, so stone either goes up the communal stairs with their half-landings and winders, or the run is designed with joins that suit the staircase rather than the kitchen. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Portered mansion blocks with a set of house rules - works hours typically 9 to 5 weekdays only, no weekends, lift protection mandatory, and the porter controls when you can bring materials through the front hall. Original lift cars will not take a full slab. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation, in that order. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Units fitted, fixed and level first. Estate leases restrict altering the layout, so you are usually working to exactly the same run positions as the old top - keep the old worktop as a reference until the new one is in.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Carcasses have to be sound first. 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. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. 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.

Quartz is the sensible default in a rental: nothing to seal, nothing to maintain, and nothing an incoming tenant needs briefing on. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come. 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.