Restaurant and cafe table tops in Northwick Park

Yes. Northwick Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA1, HA3. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. Deliveries land before the doors open wherever possible. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The original fitted dresser and the vent to outside air have often left their openings behind the units, unfilled and unrecorded. Loading is restricted, often to a short window in the morning, so the order arrives complete and gets counted inside rather than on the pavement. The room is handed back laid up, whatever the building. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. The gangway is a measurement rather than an impression.

Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. Nothing is carried past a chair still in the gangway. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. Where the standing is short the pieces are counted off at the tail lift against the plan rather than checked once they are already inside. The plan on the van matches the plan on the floor.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. Held stock is worth more than a discount. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. A room opening in a second phase is worth naming now, while the material is still on the ground and a match is a telephone call. What one room learns, the next room uses.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. Colour is matched across the room, not table by table. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. Fixed seating fixes the dimension it faces. Confirm the permitted loading times and any residents’ hours with the managing agent, and settle the edge profile and the thickness before the slab is cut. Where the owner is not local, the decisions happen remotely, so photographs and a clear itemised drawing carry more weight than a showroom visit ever would. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. Consistency across sites is a decision, not an accident.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. What decides the cut list here is the seating plan rather than the room shape, and one repeated table size nests far better than six one-offs. Veining is laid out so no two pieces read as a pair.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Sintered stone at 12mm changes what a staircase can take, because the same run arrives at roughly half the weight of the granite equivalent. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. Polished faces never travel touching each other.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. A spare comes off the same run or it is not a spare.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Floors are concrete with a screed and a thin finish, so there is no give anywhere and packing the carcasses is the only way to get a plane. The trade on a street of this sort sits at ground floor with flats above it, so deliveries run to a window and the window is short. A goods lift takes a frame and saves a morning.