Worktops in Paddington

Yes. Paddington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W2. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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. Dust from a sintered slab belongs at the works, not on a street. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Boxed soil stacks and ventilation ducts run behind the units, and the boxing depth changes between floor level and worktop height. Kitchens in these blocks are compact and open to the living space, so the surface is furniture as much as work surface and a quiet consistent stone carries that better than a dramatic one. Plain stone takes the seam that a long carry forces. Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. 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. Heat at the lip of an opening is the slow kind of damage.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. 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. A remnant worth keeping rides back on the van rather than to a skip. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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 offcut is yours if you want it and ours if you do not.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. 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. Repeat work rewards a single decision taken carefully. Housings and integrated appliances are set out for a 38mm laminate top, so dropping to 20mm or 30mm stone changes the clearances and needs checking before anything is cut. 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 surface for a let flat is chosen for the next tenant, not this one.

Peninsulas frequently land on a lightweight partition or on units that were never fixed down, and stone needs proper support under it before it goes on. 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. Nesting is where the quiet savings on a kitchen live. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. 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. The obstruction is templated as found and cut as templated. Send the kitchen layout with run lengths and the peninsula projection if there is one, and tell us what the lift will take as a single piece. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. Where nobody will be around to maintain it, the surface is chosen for indifference: an engineered top asks for nothing beyond a cloth, while a natural one wants sealing and someone willing to do it. A let kitchen is specified for indifference, and rightly so.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. 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 kitchen is usually part of the living space, so three edges are read from a sofa rather than from standing height at the sink. Which stone belongs on top of all that is a separate question from the building itself, and it is the one with a figure attached, because supply alone runs from £110 to £550 per square metre before a single cut has been made. Quartz, granite and sintered stone answer three different rooms.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. 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 bold vein and a busy shape are an expensive pair.

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. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. A mitred corner asks the pattern to turn through a right angle, which an even speckle does without comment and a marble-look stone makes a performance of. Every return end is another polished face to pay for.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. 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. Thinner stone carries easily and asks for continuous support.