Stone bar tops in Nine Elms

Yes. Nine Elms is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW8, SW11. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The goods lift is generous and the flat entrance often is not, so the tightest point on the route is inside the flat rather than in the building. This is the stock where a bar is most often a working one, with a glasswasher, a waste, a drip tray and beer lines all needing to be planned under the top before the piece is drawn. The back of a freestanding bar is finished like the front. A deep scribe comes out of the nest, so how far the stone has to be relieved changes which part of the slab the piece is cut from. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. A bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true.

A car will often hold more than its doors will admit, and it is the clear width between the door edges that a piece actually has to pass through. That matters more on a bar than on a run, because a join forced by the way in cannot be allowed to land in the unsupported part of the nose. Stools and back shelving come in after the stone is down. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. That has to cover more than the unload, since the corbels, the flat bar and the fixings all come off the van well before the top does. The van stands for the frame as well as the top.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. A serving counter and a bar are one piece under two loads. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. The steel is priced with the bar, not after it.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. The stool positions go on the drawing before the join does. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A downstand over a run caps wall unit height before it caps anything else, and the splashback then takes its height from the steel rather than from the units. A bar top is levelled to itself rather than to what it stands on, so the packing goes into the frame and the stools take up whatever the floor is doing. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them. Send the bar layout with the glasswasher, sink and waste positions marked, and tell us the route from where a van can stand to the room. Work between tenancies runs against a fixed date rather than a preference, and stone has a lead time that has to fit inside that window with a few days spare. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. Consent for a structural fixing comes before the fitting date.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Encased steel is always bigger than the steel inside it, so the casing is what gets plotted, and a casing is rarely square to the wall it sits against. Where the nose has to be carried past something fixed the support moves rather than the stone, since a corbel landing in the knee space is worse than no corbel at all. The knee space is measured before the bracket is specified.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Once a long piece is in on the diagonal there is no room left for anyone else, so it travels up alone and is met on the landing above. The steel and the corbels travel that same route and go in first, so a bar is three separate carries into one room rather than a single delivery. A bar top is heavier than it looks because the apron is solid.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Poured screed over steel decking can fall away across a long run, so level is checked across the whole room before anything is packed. That changes the order of the job: the services are set out first, the frame is built round them, and the stone is machined to suit what is already there. Where the walls give nothing, the bar stands on its own.

Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. 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. Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into them. A top with a bonded apron on the front arrives deeper than a worktop and behaves like a beam, so there is no easing it round a turn at all. Where the way in is awkward the bar is drawn in tiers.