Stone bar tops in Shoreditch

Yes. Shoreditch is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2A, E1, E2. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. The stone comes off last because it goes down last. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Steel columns and downstands land where the frame put them, which is frequently in the middle of what would otherwise be a clean run. This is the stock where a bar is most often a working one, with a glasswasher, a waste, a drip tray and beer lines all needing to be planned under the top before the piece is drawn. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows. A downstand over a run caps wall unit height before it caps anything else, and the splashback then takes its height from the steel rather than from the units. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. The riser is boxed to a line the stone can follow.

Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. That matters more on a bar than on a run, because a join forced by the way in cannot be allowed to land in the unsupported part of the nose. Nothing about a front edge survives being dragged. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. A trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. A short unload is still a long fit on a bar.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. 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. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. Frames get opened up again when the support was left out. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. Two heights means two edge profiles and a spine between them. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Encased steel is always bigger than the steel inside it, so the casing is what gets plotted, and a casing is rarely square to the wall it sits against. A bar top is levelled to itself rather than to what it stands on, so the packing goes into the frame and the stools take up whatever the floor is doing. Steel spans what a carcass cannot. Send the bar layout with the glasswasher, sink and waste positions marked, and tell us the route from where a van can stand to the room. 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. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. Fixings into structure are agreed before they are drilled.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Nothing changes hands until after the template. Painted brick is flat nowhere, and raked-back mortar joints leave a line no straightedge agrees with. A bar top put into a room like that is an overhang question first, because the nose has to carry people leaning on it long after the slab has stopped being interesting. Elbows and glasses, not knives and pans.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Whether the stone can stand on end in the car is the first question, because a lift that takes 2.1m upright takes nothing like that lying flat. A top with a bonded apron on the front arrives deeper than a worktop and behaves like a beam, so there is no easing it round a turn at all. The corbels go in before the top does, and both use the same door.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. The goods lift is generous and the flat entrance often is not, so the tightest point on the route is inside the flat rather than in the building. That changes the order of the job: the services are set out first, the frame is built round them, and the stone is machined to suit what is already there. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up.