Kitchen worktops in South Kensington

Yes. The Thurloe and Onslow estate houses run to five or six storeys with a full basement, and the kitchen sits at basement level under the front pavement vault, often with a light well at the front and a dining room behind. Runs of 3.6m plus a substantial island are common, and stone is frequently specified as a full slab splashback behind the range because there is no window on that wall. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. The fitting slot is set around it, which is why we ask about it when the date is booked and not before we leave the yard. Camera enforcement does not take an explanation.

1840s-50s stucco crescent and terrace, Italianate garden square house, Victorian mansion block and embassy-scale townhouse. The rear extension is frequently original rather than added, which means it is solidly built and just as far out of square as the rest of the house. The day is planned backwards from the hall. The building moved decades ago and the fit allows for it.

Most of it is listed or in conservation area with pavement vaults, so you cannot stack slabs on the flags outside without checking the vault below, and the front area steps down to the basement door are the usual route in. Cromwell Road and the museum roads are heavily restricted, and the residents' bays fill early, so an early morning slot is worth having. Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The maximum piece is written on the drawing in millimetres.

Worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Nested for the job in front of us. Under-pavement vaults and cellar lids look solid and are not - never set an A-frame down on the flags in front of these houses without seeing what is underneath.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Nothing is bonded until the whole run sits flat. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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 piece is nested around the scribe, not despite it. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one figure.

Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Nothing is cut before the signature comes back. Let us know the building when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are handled beforehand rather than on the fitting day.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Original quarry tile is often still down under two or three later floor coverings, which is why the finished floor height is rarely what anyone expects. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. The room is swept and the offcuts leave with us.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. The join is the last thing finished.

Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Nothing leaves the bench expecting a square wall.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. Nesting follows the route, not the other way round.