Bathroom worktops and vanity tops in St James's

Yes. St James's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW1A, SW1Y. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. An event-day suspension can override a bay that is perfectly usable the rest of the week, so a booked space gets checked again nearer the time. A vanity fit is a short visit with one or two pieces in it, so the van stands only for as long as it takes to walk them in. No basin aperture is worth rushing for a parking bay. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. The bathroom in one of these is almost never original: it is a later room over the back addition, or a bedroom divided in two. Pressed steel baths and stone vanities are a common pairing. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. The tile joint behind is what shows a top that is not level.

A hall that widens further in is still only as good as its tightest point, and that point is usually within a metre of the front door. A vanity is the one piece of stone that route will not usually defeat, because a top cut to a standard unit depth weighs what one person can manage. The landing turn matters more than the front door for a bathroom. 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. A bathroom booked on its own rarely fills a day, so it can be put into whichever part of the day the street is easiest. The bathroom pieces come off last and go in first.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop templating. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. 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 several bathrooms are done in one building the tops come off one slab run, because two greys from two batches sit badly on adjoining floors. A converted house needs a vanity on every floor. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. A house divided into flats needs a vanity for each of them, and small repeated pieces are the one case where buying a whole slab makes sense. The bathroom is decided late and the offcut has usually gone.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. A bathroom ordered with the kitchen is taken from the same slab run, so the two rooms match rather than nearly match. The thickness follows the kitchen unless you ask otherwise. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. A vanity has no depth to lose, so where a kitchen run would take a ten millimetre scribe without noticing, a shallow top cannot spare it. A stud wall takes a vanity only once there is timber behind it. Have the vanity unit fixed and levelled, and the basin and tap on site, before the templater arrives, and tell us what is inside any boxing. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. Who is paying decides the material here more than anywhere else, because a vanity is small enough that an expensive stone stops being an expensive decision. Owner bathrooms get the slab viewed; let ones get the sample.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The original front door is narrow and the hall is often the only way in, which puts a ceiling on the longest single piece. A vanity top is where all of that turns up in miniature, with the basin, the tap holes and a splash return crowded into a few hundred millimetres of stone. We seat the basin. Your plumber connects it.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. Where the kitchen swallows the whole slab there is no offcut worth having, and the vanity then has to be priced against material bought for itself. A double vanity is nested like a worktop, not like an offcut.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. None of it changes the material, but it does decide whether the top comes out of offcut stock or wants a slab bought for it alone. A bathroom top is drawn from the fitted unit, never from a plan.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. A basement is often reached by its own door under the front steps, and that door is smaller than anything else on the route. Where a bedroom has been divided to make a bathroom the window sits off centre to the new room and the vanity ends up under it, which puts the window board in the order rather than outside it. Stud partitions want noggins before a wall-hung unit goes up.