Stone bar tops in Spitalfields

Yes. Spitalfields is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. A short unload is still a long fit on a bar. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. In a cellar the headroom fixes the counter height first and everything else works back from it, and the stair down is the tightest part of the route because stone carried downward is harder to control than stone carried up. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. Nothing under the nose is allowed to be in the way.

The ground below stays closed off for the whole lift, which on a shared forecourt means telling whoever controls that ground well beforehand. The steel and the corbels travel that same route and go in first, so a bar is three separate carries into one room rather than a single delivery. Front tier and back tier are carried and set as two pieces. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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. Permits are sorted before a corbel is drilled.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop design & quotation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. 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. The brief changes, but the nose still has to be carried. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. Harder use and stronger cleaning products push the answer towards porcelain or sintered stone, because a resin-bound surface is the one that shows what has been left standing on it. Where the use is hard, the surface is chosen for it.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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. The overhang is drawn before the layout is signed off. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. The back of a bar is seen, so the back is finished. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. Who signs off the steel is settled before it is ordered.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. Noggins go into a stud wall before a bar is fixed to it.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Pieces going in on a hoist are sized to the opening and to what a crew can control in the air, which nearly always means more joins than the run would otherwise need. 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. Where the route is tight the bar gains a join behind a corbel.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. 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. Where the counter runs flush with the working surface instead of standing above it the whole thing becomes one plane, which looks better and doubles the unsupported span. A bar top is a shape decision with steel attached to it.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up.