Reception counters and desks in Middle Park

Yes. Middle Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. 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 commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Where the bay is booked by the hour, pieces come off in fitting order. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceilings sit at about two point three metres and the head of the window is close under them, so a unit over the window has very little wall to hold onto. Estates of this kind carry the buildings that serve them: a housing office, a health centre, a community hall, and every one has a counter the public queues at. The knee recess is argued over hardest where the floor is shallowest. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. The counter is scribed to the carcass, and the carcass to the floor.

Timber nosings chip under a slipped edge, so the treads are covered along the whole flight rather than only at the landings. 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. The way in is walked with the joiner as well as with a tape. 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. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. The transaction shelf can wait on the van; the counter cannot.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop fabrication. 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. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. A phased fit-out gets phased templating, one lobby at a time. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. 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. What the operator needs at the shelf outranks the elevation.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Overhang at the public face is agreed before the carcass is built. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. A counter standing proud of the wall has nothing to hide behind. Tell us the hours the building can be worked in and whether the lobby stays open, and send photographs of every corner so we can find the ducts before we draw. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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. Reception fit-outs answer to a lease as much as to a drawing.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. The original units were screwed to timber grounds set into the wall, and where those were torn out the plaster was patched rather than replaced. 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. A lobby gets templated the way a kitchen never is.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. A steep pitch shortens the tread and lengthens the reach, which leaves whoever is below carrying most of the weight for the full flight. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. Piece length is capped in the drawing office, not on the landing.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The kitchen was laid out to a nineteen-sixties module, so the units in it are often 500 or 550 deep and a modern carcass does not land on the same line. What decides the piece sizes is the lobby and the way into it, since a counter top runs longer than a kitchen worktop and has no cabinet run to break it up. Serving height comes off the standard, not off the sketch.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. A lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The carcass is levelled before the top is ever offered up.