Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in Mayfair

Yes. Mayfair is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W1J, W1K, W1S. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. A resident bay and a shared-use bay can sit on the same street under different rules, and it is usually the shared one a visitor permit or a ticket touches. 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. A second visit for a splash return is one we would rather avoid. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Windows are low and wide with deep timber cills and leaded lights, so a run under one meets joinery rather than plaster. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any honest measure: it is nested like one, carried like one and priced like one. An original bathroom is usually the smallest room upstairs. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Templated off the fitted unit, never off the bathroom plan.

Car depth is the number that settles it wherever a piece cannot be stood upright, and most residential cars are shallower than the run they are serving. 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. An en-suite off a bedroom adds a second flight, not a second job. A shared-use bay allows a paid stay up to a set maximum, and that maximum is routinely shorter than the working day the job needs. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. Short jobs suffer most from a van that has to move.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. Repeat bathrooms come cheaper per top, not per square metre. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. One template visit covers both rooms if both are ready. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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 scribe on a vanity is measured in depth it cannot spare. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. Who is paying decides the material here more than anywhere else, because a vanity is small enough that an expensive stone stops being an expensive decision. A bathroom done once is worth the conversation about finish.

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. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Camera enforcement gives nobody the chance to explain, where an officer on foot at least sees a tail lift down and stone coming off it. A bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. The whole bathroom fits on a trolley in one load.

The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. 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. The vanity comes off what the kitchen leaves behind.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Walls that are old, thick and rarely straight make dry-laying and scribing the bulk of the day. 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. The bridge of stone behind the basin is the part that matters.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Internal walls are lath and plaster on studs with heavy framing behind, so a fixing finds either nothing at all or something very solid. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any other measure. Half tiling leaves a line the splash return has to meet.