Restaurant and cafe table tops 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. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

The chimney breast is usually still standing with the opening blocked up, and the alcoves either side of it are rarely the same width as each other. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. Chair backs do more damage than plates ever do. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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. A shallow room decides the diameter early.

A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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. A lift takes a loaded frame or it takes nothing. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. A refit is a resurface where the pedestals are sound. 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. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room.

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 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. Shapes are drawn rather than described. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. 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. Sharp corners are eased wherever people pass. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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. Sign-off covers shape, edge, drilling and count.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Party wall settlement pulls the floor down at one side of the room, so a long run reads level at one end and not at the other. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Every face polished, because a table is looked down on.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. 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. Nothing is cut until the seating plan stops moving.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. The bases go in first and are stood where they belong, so nothing heavy is dragged across a floor that has already been finished. Handling is where a polished edge gets damaged.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. A top-floor conversion puts part of the kitchen under the slope of the roof, so the wall behind the run stops at head height along one side of the room. A unit in an old parade rarely has rear access, which means every top and every base comes through the front door in the order it will be set out. Old floors fall away and the feet take it up.