Worktops 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. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. Whatever the standing allows, the stone leaves that van finished, because every edge, cut-out and internal radius is machined at the works and none of it is open to reconsideration at the kerb. A natural surface is sealed at the end of its own fitting day. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The original larder or store cupboard usually survives in a corner, and that alcove is deeper than the units and squarer than the walls around it. The kitchen in one of these sits in the back addition and takes its daylight from one end, so the working half of the run is the darker half and a pale stone with a honed or matt face does more there than any colour with depth in it. Side light flatters movement and wastes a flat colour. 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. Every notch and every scribe is machined into the piece before it leaves the works, and a hard sintered surface is the least forgiving of a tight internal corner, so one is always cut with a generous radius. Porous or sealed is a decision about the next ten years.

Two people will walk a two-metre piece in through a front door; the same hall with a three-metre piece wants four, purely because nobody can let go halfway. That caps the longest piece, and a run split into two lengths nests differently on the slab, which moves the yield and moves the figure with it. The protective film peels off last so the finish is untouched. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. A granite kitchen ends its day with a sealer, and a sealer wants a dry face and a quiet hour afterwards, so that hour is written into the day rather than borrowed from it. Dust from a sintered slab belongs at the works, not on a street.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. 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 several kitchens are ordered together the sensible move is to take them all off one batch, because two slabs of the same name bought six months apart will not sit happily in the same building. A surface for a let flat is chosen for the next tenant, not this one. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Volume work tends to live at the entry end of the range, and the entry end is genuine stone rather than a compromise, since the lowest supply figure we quote is a sintered surface and not a thin laminate pretending to be one. Where the cooking is serious, heat tolerance leads the list.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. A shape like that nests kindly on a slab, so more of what gets bought ends up on the units and the rate per square metre behaves much as the brochure says it will. Edge metreage climbs with corners, not with floor area. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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 hob dropped into the middle of a length puts sustained warmth at the lip of a cut-out, and an engineered surface will yellow there across ten years where a natural one takes it without comment. A short upstand shows a fragment of pattern, never a run of it. Send the run lengths, say where the sink and hob will sit, and tell us which way the room faces and what lighting is going in above the working run. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. That changes which questions are worth asking about the stone, because somebody staying put wants to know how a honed face marks in five years and somebody selling wants to know how it photographs next spring. Whoever holds the keys later is the one who needs the paperwork.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. No money is taken before the template happens. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. Which stone belongs on top of all that is a separate question from the building itself, and it is the one with a figure attached, because supply alone runs from £110 to £550 per square metre before a single cut has been made. Batch before colour name, because names outlive the batch they came from.

Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Adding an island is what moves most of these projects from one slab to two, and that jump is the single largest step in any worktop quotation. Order the stone against the room, never against the drawing.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. 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. Sintered surfaces are the hardest of the three to machine and the messiest to cut wet, which is precisely why none of that happens on a public pavement. The offcut is yours if you want it and ours if you do not.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. An island is the piece that decides whether one slab covers the kitchen or two, and a second slab arrives as a step in the figure rather than a gentle slope. A pale honed face earns its keep in a room short of daylight.