Kitchen worktops in St James's

Yes. Very little conventional family housing - most stone work here is in apartments over commercial floors, chambers-style flats, and back-of-house kitchens and pantries in club and office buildings. Layouts are plain single runs and service counters rather than designed kitchens, but the finishes have to match a period interior. Where a road is shut for filming or for works the diversion adds distance to the carry even when parking itself was never the problem. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Straps and battens are chosen for lifting, not just for transit.

Georgian townhouse, club and chambers building and period apartment above commercial. Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. The galley run down a side-return usually measures longer than a slab will give us, so a join is designed in from the start and nested to land over a cabinet gable rather than wherever the material happens to run out. The fall across the floor is in the cut list.

Security zones around Whitehall and the royal parks bring road closures and vehicle checks, and ceremonial events shut the area at short notice. Buildings are listed with managed access, and deliveries generally go through a rear service entrance with a signed-in trolley route. An inward-opening door swinging back against the wall leaves less clear opening than the frame measures, and a storm porch in front of it is tighter again. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. The way in is agreed before the crew is booked, not after.

Worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Lease hours decide when the noisy part happens. Most of this is commercial-adjacent work, so surfaces need to take heat and heavy use in a small area - a hard sintered surface beats a resin quartz next to a commercial hob.

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. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Dry-assembled to the shape of your run. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. If it will not drop in, it goes back out to the saw. Material is from £110 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting are each quoted on their own line.

Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Emptying the room belongs to the keyholder, not the crew. If we know the building when you book, the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are worked into the day rather than found on it.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Join count follows the shape, not the metreage.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. What the wall does is on the drawing before the saw runs.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. 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. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. 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. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. A tenant moves in on the date on the contract.