Reception counters and desks in Portsoken

Yes. Portsoken is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1, EC3N. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. A timed school street shuts the road either side of the school day, so the van goes in between those two windows or it does not go in. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Where the bay is booked by the hour, pieces come off in fitting order. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The stair is a straight concrete flight with a quarter landing at each floor and a solid balustrade wall alongside it. The parades behind terraces of this period carry pharmacies, minicab offices, takeaways and small surgeries, and their counters are the hardest-used stone we fit. Nurseries want a hatch, and the hatch is on the same drawing. 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 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. What the joiner left behind is what the templater records.

A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. 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. A goods lift diagonal belongs on the counter drawing. An event-day suspension can override a bay that is perfectly usable the rest of the week, so a booked space gets checked again nearer the time. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. The transaction shelf can wait on the van; the counter cannot.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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. A weekend fit is planned as a weekend fit from the outset. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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 repeatable counter needs a repeatable material.

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. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Setting out starts at the entrance end and works inward. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. 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. A bowed lobby wall is a scribe, and a scribe takes hours. Tell us whether there is rear access off a service road, and send the carcass dimensions with the till, terminal and cable positions marked on them. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. 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. Whoever holds the keys holds the fitting slot.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. 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. 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. The return between the high counter and the low shelf never nests neatly, and it is what decides how much slab the desk swallows. A counter reads as one plane or as several, and that is a drawing decision.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. 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. Pieces come in the order the carcass will accept them.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Floors are concrete planks with a screed, so the room is flat by construction and the units sit close to one plane. A pharmacy counter is two heights by regulation as much as by preference, with a consultation position and a dispensing side that never meets the public. The building stays open, so the counter goes in after hours.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Infill blocks were built on gaps in older streets, so a modern block sits between period buildings with no service access of its own. The units on these parades are shallow, so the counter takes most of the floor and every millimetre of the knee recess is argued over. The building around the lobby decides the counter more than the brief does.