Worktops in Shooters Hill

Yes. Shooters Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE18. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. A granite kitchen ends its day with a sealer, and a sealer wants a dry face and a quiet hour afterwards, so that hour is written into the day rather than borrowed from it. Remnants become chopping boards, hearths and window boards. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Windows are low and wide with deep timber cills and leaded lights, so a run under one meets joinery rather than plaster. There is usually an island, and the island takes the liveliest part of the stone while the perimeter is allowed to stay quiet, which is a decision made at the slab rather than on paper. The island earns the liveliest part of the stone. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. Every notch and every scribe is machined into the piece before it leaves the works, and a hard sintered surface is the least forgiving of a tight internal corner, so one is always cut with a generous radius. The narrowest return in the kitchen is its weakest stone.

The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. That caps the longest piece, and a run split into two lengths nests differently on the slab, which moves the yield and moves the figure with it. Thin sintered stone weighs about half what thick granite does. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. Sintered surfaces are the hardest of the three to machine and the messiest to cut wet, which is precisely why none of that happens on a public pavement. Colour matched resin is mixed to the slab, not to a chart.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Where several kitchens are ordered together the sensible move is to take them all off one batch, because two slabs of the same name bought six months apart will not sit happily in the same building. A surface for a let flat is chosen for the next tenant, not this one. 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. Volume work tends to live at the entry end of the range, and the entry end is genuine stone rather than a compromise, since the lowest supply figure we quote is a sintered surface and not a thin laminate pretending to be one. Where the cooking is serious, heat tolerance leads the list.

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 shape like that nests kindly on a slab, so more of what gets bought ends up on the units and the rate per square metre behaves much as the brochure says it will. Runs in view together come off adjoining areas of one slab. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. A hob dropped into the middle of a length puts sustained warmth at the lip of a cut-out, and an engineered surface will yellow there across ten years where a natural one takes it without comment. Porous or sealed is a decision about the next ten years. Send the island dimensions and the perimeter run lengths, say whether a waterfall end is wanted, and tell us which slab you would like reserved. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. That changes which questions are worth asking about the stone, because somebody staying put wants to know how a honed face marks in five years and somebody selling wants to know how it photographs next spring. Whoever holds the keys later is the one who needs the paperwork.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Wide doors, generous rooms and somewhere to park mean the joins that go in are the ones we choose, not the ones the building forces. 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. The slab is the decision; the room only sets how much of it you need.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. 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. 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. An island is the piece that decides whether one slab covers the kitchen or two, and a second slab arrives as a step in the figure rather than a gentle slope. Edge metreage climbs with corners, not with floor area.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. Where a seam becomes unavoidable the choice of stone starts to matter, because a fine even speckle closes a joint almost invisibly and a broad vein simply will not. Flexing a porcelain length round a turn is how one breaks.

The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. A run that sits under strong sun for hours every afternoon suits a surface built to be stable in daylight, because a resin-bound stone is made for indoor use and sustained sunlight is the one thing it was never designed around. A short upstand shows a fragment of pattern, never a run of it.