Worktops in Nunhead

Yes. Nunhead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE15. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. A figured slab takes longer to match than a plain one. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The party wall is the straightest surface in the house and everything else has moved away from it over a century. The kitchen in one of these sits in the back addition and takes its daylight from one end, so the working half of the run is the darker half and a pale stone with a honed or matt face does more there than any colour with depth in it. Cool artificial light turns a warm stone grey. 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. A deep scribe moves the pattern back along with the depth.

The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. Pattern is carried across a seam on the bench, never by eye on site. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Stone is delivered machined, sealed and covered, in that order.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. 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. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. The remainder of a slab is bought whether it is fitted or not. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Volume work tends to live at the entry end of the range, and the entry end is genuine stone rather than a compromise, since the lowest supply figure we quote is a sintered surface and not a thin laminate pretending to be one. A focal surface deserves to be seen at full size.

Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. 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. Extra depth sounds free and frequently buys another slab. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. Thirty millimetres bridges a gap that twenty millimetres will not. 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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. Repairability is a fair question to ask before choosing.

Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. 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. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Sintered surfaces are the hardest of the three to machine and the messiest to cut wet, which is precisely why none of that happens on a public pavement. The face is uncovered once, and that once is at handover.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. These were built with a scullery that has since been swallowed by an extension, leaving a change of floor level roughly where the run crosses. 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. Open-plan surfaces are furniture before they are work surfaces.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. Where a seam becomes unavoidable the choice of stone starts to matter, because a fine even speckle closes a joint almost invisibly and a broad vein simply will not. The way in caps the piece, and the slab layout follows the cap.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. 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. A cranked piece eats more slab than the two straights it replaces.