Stone bar tops in St John's Wood

Yes. St John's Wood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW8. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. A market day closes the street to traffic for the morning and hands it back in the afternoon, which moves the visit rather than cancelling it. 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 red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A townhouse is tall and narrow with the kitchen at the bottom, so every piece goes down a staircase rather than along a hall. There is normally room here for a genuine bar rather than a seating overhang, which means a rear counter, a small sink and a run of shelving being drawn as one piece of joinery with the stone reading across all of it. Scribed at the back and free at the front. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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.

Once a long piece is in on the diagonal there is no room left for anyone else, so it travels up alone and is met on the landing above. That matters more on a bar than on a run, because a join forced by the way in cannot be allowed to land in the unsupported part of the nose. The corbels go in before the top does, and both use the same door. 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. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. 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. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. Where the same detail is repeating across several rooms the support gets standardised once and then cut to length, which is cheaper than drawing it each time. Sintered stone earns its keep where the cleaning is harsh. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. An overhang on a plan is not an overhang with steel under it.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. 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 on an end takes the corner load a wall used to take. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. A landlord with several similar flats usually wants one specification repeated, so the material, the edge detail and the upstand height are recorded and reused rather than rechosen each time. 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. A quote for a bar names who is providing the frame.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into them. 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. A bar top will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. Nothing sits over a join that somebody leans on.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. A separate bar in the same room still takes its services from the same run, so the waste, the socket and the water are set out with the kitchen even though the joinery is not. The overhang is drawn before the layout is signed off.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. 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. The nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded.