Bathroom worktops and vanity 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. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. A vanity fit is a short visit with one or two pieces in it, so the van stands only for as long as it takes to walk them in. An en-suite and a family bathroom come off the same load. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The kitchen is generally a rear extension or a knocked-through pair of rooms, so part of the perimeter is old wall and part of it is new. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any honest measure: it is nested like one, carried like one and priced like one. Old pipework is boxed rather than moved, and the top notches round it. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. Where the wall bows, the splash return is scribed to follow it.

Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. A vanity is the one piece of stone that route will not usually defeat, because a top cut to a standard unit depth weighs what one person can manage. The turn at the head of the stairs decides a double vanity. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. A bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay.

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. 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. Where several bathrooms are done in one building the tops come off one slab run, because two greys from two batches sit badly on adjoining floors. A repeated top is still drilled to the taps actually bought. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. A house divided into flats needs a vanity for each of them, and small repeated pieces are the one case where buying a whole slab makes sense. A rear addition adds a cloakroom before it adds anything else.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. That shape decides what is left on the slab when the kitchen has been cut, and what is left on the slab is where most vanity tops come from. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. A vanity has no depth to lose, so where a kitchen run would take a ten millimetre scribe without noticing, a shallow top cannot spare it. A basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. 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. Who is paying decides the material here more than anywhere else, because a vanity is small enough that an expensive stone stops being an expensive decision. Quartz in a let bathroom, because nothing needs sealing.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. The bathroom pieces come off last and go in first.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. 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 wall-hung unit puts the whole weight into the wall rather than onto the floor, so what the wall is built of stops being a detail. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. A curved bay or a canted corner turns up more often here than people expect, and a curve is templated and cut, never bent. What that does to a vanity is push the whole job into a narrow depth, because a bathroom takes the same stone as a kitchen in about two thirds of the width. Most vanity tops begin life as an offcut from another room.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. The exception is a double vanity, which is a kitchen length in bathroom width and behaves like a worktop from the tail lift onwards. Offcut-sized pieces are the easiest stone in the trade to move.