Worktops in New Cross

Yes. New Cross is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. Whatever the standing allows, the stone leaves that van finished, because every edge, cut-out and internal radius is machined at the works and none of it is open to reconsideration at the kerb. Stone is delivered machined, sealed and covered, in that order. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The partitions put in at conversion are studwork standing on the old floor, so they take a fixing well but carry nothing, and a heavy end panel needs a different answer. Rooms in these houses run long and narrow with the only honest daylight at the garden end, so a pale honed surface does more for the working half of the kitchen than any colour with depth in it. Plain stone takes the seam that a long carry forces. 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. Every notch and every scribe is machined into the piece before it leaves the works, and a hard sintered surface is the least forgiving of a tight internal corner, so one is always cut with a generous radius. Strong daylight is an argument for a surface built to take it.

Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for the day. That caps the longest piece, and a run split into two lengths nests differently on the slab, which moves the yield and moves the figure with it. Weight per square metre belongs to the material, not to the length. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. A granite kitchen ends its day with a sealer, and a sealer wants a dry face and a quiet hour afterwards, so that hour is written into the day rather than borrowed from it. The face is uncovered once, and that once is at handover.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Where a single building holds several small kitchens, the work arrives as one job rather than four, and it should be cut off the same slab run so the batches genuinely match. Where several kitchens are ordered together the sensible move is to take them all off one batch, because two slabs of the same name bought six months apart will not sit happily in the same building. Colour names outlive their batches by several years. Small kitchens in a shared house are all short runs and tight cut-out spacing, which is more bench work per square metre than one large kitchen would be. Adding an island is what moves most of these projects from one slab to two, and that jump is the single largest step in any worktop quotation. Fitting follows template by five to ten working days.

A single long run down one side puts every cut-out in one piece, so the sink, the hob and any drainer grooves all take material out of the same length. A shape like that nests kindly on a slab, so more of what gets bought ends up on the units and the rate per square metre behaves much as the brochure says it will. Two mitres and three lengths is bench work, not surface area. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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 hob dropped into the middle of a length puts sustained warmth at the lip of a cut-out, and an engineered surface will yellow there across ten years where a natural one takes it without comment. A deep scribe moves the pattern back along with the depth. Send the run lengths, say where the sink and hob will sit, and tell us which way the room faces and what lighting is going in above the working run. A landlord with several similar flats usually wants one specification repeated, so the material, the edge detail and the upstand height are recorded and reused rather than rechosen each time. That changes which questions are worth asking about the stone, because somebody staying put wants to know how a honed face marks in five years and somebody selling wants to know how it photographs next spring. A surface chosen for a photograph rarely survives the cooking.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A galley run down a side-return extension usually measures longer than a slab will give in one length, so a join is designed in from the start rather than discovered. An island is the piece that decides whether one slab covers the kitchen or two, and a second slab arrives as a step in the figure rather than a gentle slope. A single straight run is the cheapest stone you will ever buy.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. The flat entrance door is a certified fire door on a closer, and taking it off for an hour means dealing with the seals and the closer before the day ends. The alcoves either side of a breast break the run into short pieces, and short pieces are exactly where buying a full slab outright starts to beat buying stone by the metre. Hard-working kitchens suit surfaces that ask for nothing.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. 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. A run that sits under strong sun for hours every afternoon suits a surface built to be stable in daylight, because a resin-bound stone is made for indoor use and sustained sunlight is the one thing it was never designed around. Thirty millimetres bridges a gap that twenty millimetres will not.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Boxed sash frames swallow a hundred millimetres of wall on each side of the opening, so the wall between a window and a corner is shorter than a plan makes it look. Ceilings are tall and the joinery is usually painted, which is the setting where a thirty millimetre edge looks right and a slim one reads as a saving somebody made. Even light lets a mid-tone hold its own.