Worktop fabrication 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. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The load plan follows from it. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Windows are large industrial openings with deep sills, and a run finishing at one meets a reveal a full brick deep. The kitchen is open plan and the island is often long enough to need a join, and it sits in the middle of the room where every edge is visible, so the join goes over a gable and usually under the hob line where the eye does not follow it. Nested to the route first and the slab second. A brick pier standing into the run divides it in two, and the join goes against the pier where a clear wall would have needed no join at all. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. The drawing decides it, not the fitter.

A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. It is settled on the bench, not on site. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. It is decided in the yard, not at the kerb.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. 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. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. One kept offcut saves a whole flat later. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Repeat runs come off a jig, not a fresh setout.

The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Offcut sizes are decided before the first cut. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Machined to the real line. The island layout, including whether the ends are mitred down to the floor, needs settling before cutting, since mitred ends are cut in sequence with the top and dry-assembled as one unit. Where the provider has set the specification the material choice was made once for a great many kitchens, and the useful work is meeting it exactly rather than proposing something else on the day. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. The approved drawing is the instruction.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Open plan means long uninterrupted runs and an island in the middle of the room with every edge on show. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Every piece is numbered to the wall it belongs against.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Undersides are polished where the piece is seen from below.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. Cut oversize on purpose, every time.

Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Services run on the surface in these buildings, so conduit and pipework cross the wall behind the units and stand proud of it. Access is by goods lift or a shared stair with a hard turn onto the landing, and both cap the piece length, so the nesting is done to the measured car or turn rather than to the slab. What leaves the bench is what fits the room.