Putney Heath worktops
The kitchens we meet in Putney Heath
A good deal of what decides stone worktop supply and fitting in Putney Heath could be settled by a tape measure and ten minutes in the room in question. Postwar blocks around the heath have separate kitchens of a fixed size with a sink under the window and a hatch to the dining area, and the usual work is a like-for-like top with matching upstands. The detached houses backing onto the heath take larger open-plan schemes with an island. The tape measure decides it, not the description above, and not anything anybody says over the telephone.
A stub wall divides the kitchen from the back lobby, and it rarely stayed where the original drawing put it. 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. Stone is bought whole and paid for whole, offcut and all.
Base units from the seventies and eighties are often only 500mm deep, so a 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors want checking against it. Coming off a thick laminate top changes the front edge, and twenty millimetres reads closer to what the room is used to than thirty does against existing tiling and a window board. Cool artificial light turns a warm stone grey.
Locally the mix runs to Interwar detached, 1950s and 60s purpose-built block and Postwar estate housing. What the units are screwed to varies between them, and that decides the fixings.
