Stone bar tops in South Hampstead

Yes. South Hampstead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW6, NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A large villa has wide doors, a generous hall and somewhere to park, so the joins that go in are chosen for layout rather than forced by the route. There is normally room here for a genuine bar rather than a seating overhang, which means a rear counter, a small sink and a run of shelving being drawn as one piece of joinery with the stone reading across all of it. The riser gets notched around, not built away from. 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. 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. Leaning is a sideways load and framing has to answer for it.

A communal flight is out of use while a piece is on it, so the carry is timed so nobody is trying to pass on a half-landing. 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 suspension only works if the cones and the notice are actually there on the morning, and now and then a car is sitting in the bay regardless. That has to cover more than the unload, since the corbels, the flat bar and the fixings all come off the van well before the top does. One van, one bar, one visit.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Repeat detail, single survey, matched batch. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. The brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried.

A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. A bar laid over that is a second level rather than a wider one, so it wants a spine underneath it and a settled detail where the two heights meet. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. Where the nose has to be carried past something fixed the support moves rather than the stone, since a corbel landing in the knee space is worse than no corbel at all. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. A home bar is discretionary work, so the edge profile, the corbel detail and the radius on the nose are worth settling properly rather than defaulting to whatever is quickest. The person leaning on it is the person it was drawn for.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. These kitchens carry two ovens, a wine cabinet and a boiling tap, so the cut-out count runs well ahead of what the length of the runs suggests. 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. Leaning weight, not saucepans, is what the piece is sized for.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. A fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. The steel and the corbels travel that same route and go in first, so a bar is three separate carries into one room rather than a single delivery. The corbels go in before the top does, and both use the same door.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. 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. A bar top will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Deep skirtings, a dado and a picture rail survive in the original rooms, so nothing sits flat to the wall without being cut around first. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. The bar is set level to itself and packed off the frame.