Splashbacks and upstands 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. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. A long carry turns a light piece into an awkward one. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Wider halls make the carry noticeably easier, and that alone can remove a join that a narrower terrace would have forced into the run. Where a client wants a full-height piece behind the hob, it usually sits in the old chimney recess, and that recess is rarely square top to bottom or side to side, so it has to be templated as a trapezium rather than a rectangle. Old plaster rarely gives you a flat metre. 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. A tall panel that fits at the worktop will stand off the wall at the top unless the wall is dubbed out or the panel is scribed. A bowed wall shows on a panel and hides under an upstand.

A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. Splashback panels are lighter than a worktop and far more awkward, because a tall thin piece has to be carried on edge and cannot be tilted to clear a turn. Nothing is leaned anywhere it could slide down. 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. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. Panels come across in one pass with the route already cleared.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is 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. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Grout lines are the first thing to fail in a let. 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. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Six kitchens, one socket layout, one panel drawing.

Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. Vein direction carries up from the top below. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

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. Where the wall cannot be made good, setting the stone deliberately proud on a subframe with a shadow gap reads as a detail rather than a bad fit. Mitred returns come from one place in the slab. The chimney breast recess must be replastered and fully dry, and the hob and extractor positions fixed, before anyone templates a full-height piece into it. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Two trades, two budgets, one drawing.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. It decides whether the run gets one continuous piece or a set of separate lengths with a joint at every obstruction. The pier takes a joint against it, not across it.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. 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. Upstands are the cheapest way to finish several kitchens consistently, and they come out of the offcuts the tops leave behind. The annexe gets the same panel as the main run.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. Upstands follow the run exactly, so every internal and external corner is a separate mitred or butted piece. Behind an island there is no wall to hide against.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. A mitred external return around it has to come from the same position in the slab, or the pattern visibly steps at the corner. A window board below worktop height ends the upstand argument.