Reception counters and desks 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. A timed school street shuts the road either side of the school day, so the van goes in between those two windows or it does not go in. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. Service yards want a name and a time, given a week out. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A basement is often reached by its own door under the front steps, and that door is smaller than anything else on the route. The commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow unit off a high-street parade, entered up a step, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. The building stays open, so the counter goes in after hours. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. The carcass is levelled before the top is ever offered up.

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. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. A knee recess is an opening, and an opening weakens a piece in transit. 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. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. The counter is unwrapped inside the building, never at the kerb.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop templating. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Nothing is cut until the joinery has been signed off. 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. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. A phased fit-out gets phased templating, one lobby at a time.

Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. Support positions go on the drawing before the top is nested. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. What a counter is scribed to is the joiner's carcass rather than the plaster, which is why it is templated after the carcass is fixed and never before. A shelf over a knee recess cannot be packed, so it is cut true. Send photographs taken walking from the pavement through the door to where the counter will stand, along with the carcass dimensions once the joiner has fixed it. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. Where a managing agent has to approve the work, the drawing goes out in a form they can sign without ever standing in the lobby. Approval in writing before a slab is committed to a desk.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. An external corner on a counter is seen from both sides at once, so it is mitred rather than butted and the pattern is carried round it. A shallow shelf still needs a support run of its own.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. 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 commercial work around housing of this age is shopfront: a narrow deep unit off a parade, with the reception running back from the door into the depth of the plan. The building around the lobby decides the counter more than the brief does.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. The front door is often the cheapest hundred millimetres on the route, because a door lifted off its hinges gives back the width its own thickness was taking. The lower transaction shelf is short and easily handled; it is the upper counter that has to be walked in on edge and turned at every corner. Every re-grip near a finished front edge is planned out beforehand.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. Where the front is curved the top is cut on a waterjet, and the carcass has to be built to the same radius rather than close to it. The public side and the staff side take different details.