Stone bar tops in South Kensington

Yes. South Kensington is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW7. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. Where parking is tight the hardware walks in ahead of the stone. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Half-landings mean the back of the house sits at a slightly different level from the front, and a knocked-through kitchen crosses that line. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows. 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. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. The frame is made true before the stone is measured.

Where the turn inside is tight the piece gets turned on the path and brought in already on edge, which needs room in front of the door as well as behind it. 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. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. A bar top left on a pavement is a bar top with a chipped nose.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. Clear length between the returns sets the stool count. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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. Who signs off the steel is settled before it is ordered.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. 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. A trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. 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 quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. 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. A column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. Anything that puts a notch in a bar takes material out of the piece at the point people lean on it, so the notch and the support are drawn together or not at all. The stone is cut to the obstruction as found.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. 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 bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects.