Restaurant and cafe table 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. 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 table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. The unload is timed between service, never through it. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. The trade on streets like these sits in a parade of narrow shopfronts, so the dining room is long and thin and the covers are won by the width of the gangway rather than by the size of the room. Long hours push the choice towards a harder face. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. The base carries the weight and the floor carries the base.

Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for the day. A table order is many small pieces rather than one long one, so the route decides how many trips the delivery takes rather than how big anything can be. A cellar stair is not a route for stone. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop templating. 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. 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. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. A trial piece before a large order is money well spent. 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. A room opening in a second phase is worth naming now, while the material is still on the ground and a match is a telephone call. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres.

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. A table top answers to none of that, since it meets no wall and needs no scribe, but the pieces come off the same slab as the counter and the colour has to carry across both. Mixed sizes are fine; unplanned mixed sizes are not. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. A column, a boxed duct or a fixed bench in a dining room is designed around with a shape cut to suit rather than notched on site. A shallow room decides the diameter early. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. 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. The length of the lease is a legitimate reason to specify differently, and nobody should be talked into a decade of surface for five years of trading. Ten years of service is a different specification entirely.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. 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. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. A shopfront door is the only way in on most parades.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. 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. Covers are won by inches in a room this narrow, so the gangway decides the table size long before anybody chooses a colour. Small rooms want small pieces and steady bases.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. On an event day the controls are wider, tighter and enforced harder than the signage suggests on any other morning of the week. Where the standing is short the pieces are counted off at the tail lift against the plan rather than checked once they are already inside. The bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Party wall settlement pulls the floor down at one side of the room, so a long run reads level at one end and not at the other. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. Cut to your bases rather than to a size off a list.