Reception counters and desks in Parsons Green

Yes. Parsons Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. 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. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The counter is unwrapped inside the building, never at the kerb. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Electrics went in at conversion, some in surface trunking and some chased into lath and plaster, so no cable route in these rooms is safe to assume. That entrance is what caps the counter, because a shopfront door and the step in front of it will take far less than a full-length top, so the run is broken over a support in the carcass rather than gambled on. Nurseries want a hatch, and the hatch is on the same drawing. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. The back return follows the wall as the wall leans.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. The counter waits on the van until there is somewhere to stand it. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A frontage with no stopping is a fitting slot, not a fitting day.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication 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. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. Apertures change from desk to desk, so each drawing is its own. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. A fit-out programme puts the counter last, behind the joiner and the electrician, which is exactly when the least time is left to template it. A weekend fit is planned as a weekend fit from the outset.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Overhang at the public face is agreed before the carcass is built. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. What a counter is scribed to is the joiner's carcass rather than the plaster, which is why it is templated after the carcass is fixed and never before. Column casings take machined returns, not filler. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. The same split runs through commercial property: a landlord fitting out a shell and a tenant fitting out their own reception want different things from one counter. The knee recess is not negotiable, whoever is signing.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. An external corner on a counter is seen from both sides at once, so it is mitred rather than butted and the pattern is carried round it. A join in the shelf and a join in the top belong in one place.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the 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. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. Two heights means two carries, and the low one is not the difficult one.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Crew size follows the distance from the van to the lobby.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. The knee recess is a dimension, not a styling note.