Kitchen worktops in Soho

Yes. Small flats above bars, restaurants and shops with kitchens under 2.5m of run, often in a room with a sloping ceiling on the top floor. Compact appliances, slimline dishwashers, and worktop depths cut down to 550mm to keep a walkway are routine. 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 replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. The waste run is planned, not improvised.

18th-century walk-up house, flat above restaurant and warehouse-style conversion. Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

The hardest access in the borough. No parking at all, pedestrianised sections, servicing windows that clash with restaurant deliveries, and 18th-century houses with 700mm doors and steep dogleg stairs with winders and no landing. Night-time economy means the working window is genuinely 8am to lunchtime. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. It sets what the day actually looks like.

Worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. Units fitted, fixed and level first. Winder stairs in these old houses mean the maximum piece that will physically turn is often around 1.8m - design the joints for the staircase first and the kitchen second.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Carcasses have to be sound first. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Eased in, never forced. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. No stone is cut from a plan. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.