Reception counters and desks in Richmond Hill

Yes. Richmond Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW10. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Waiting time on a counter job is the most expensive hour of it. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. Steel and brick leave a desk nothing to lean against. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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.

Timber nosings chip under a slipped edge, so the treads are covered along the whole flight rather than only at the landings. 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 polished front edge travels facing inward, always. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. The counter comes off the van first and goes in last.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Where the lobby stays open, the work runs outside opening hours. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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 spare offcut kept back can save a whole counter later.

Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. 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. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. Where a managing agent has to approve the work, the drawing goes out in a form they can sign without ever standing in the lobby. A managed lobby has rules the counter has to be carried under.

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. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. 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. A lobby gets templated the way a kitchen never is.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. A reception fit is often booked outside opening hours precisely because that is when the kerb in front of the building is free. A booked bay costs less than an hour of a crew standing still.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. 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. Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. 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.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. A picture rail, a deep skirting and a moulded architrave all sit in the way of anything that assumes flat wall from floor to ceiling. Two working surfaces at two heights, a return between them and clear knee space under the lower one: that is the shape almost every counter ends up being, whatever the front elevation promised. Serving height comes off the standard, not off the sketch.