Bathroom worktops and vanity 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. 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. Where the van cannot wait, the top, the shelves and the adhesive all come in on the first trip and the van goes. The bathroom pieces come off last and go in first. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Rooms are formally proportioned with deep reveals and shutter boxes, so runs under windows are templated to what is actually there. A freestanding bath in the middle of the room pushes the vanity to a wall and often under a window, so the window board is drawn with the top rather than added later from a second offcut. What the wall is made of decides how the unit is fixed. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. Bathrooms carry the same problems in a smaller room, and a smaller room leaves a vanity nowhere to absorb them. A basin cannot be moved to suit a wall that is out of true.

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 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. A cloakroom under the stairs is a short carry into a tight room. 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. A vanity fit ends before most parking restrictions do.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. Work of that kind brings en-suites with it, and an en-suite vanity is a smaller piece again carrying exactly the same four operations. En-suites and family bathrooms rarely take the same depth. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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. Repeat work is where a vanity stops being an afterthought.

A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. That shape decides what is left on the slab when the kitchen has been cut, and what is left on the slab is where most vanity tops come from. A vanity is nested last and cut from what is left. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each 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. The waste position is fixed before the aperture is drawn. Send the unit layout for every bathroom at once with the basin and tap models against each, so the slab can be nested for all of them. Where a letting agent sits between us and the owner the approval passes through two sets of hands, so a quote has to be clear enough to forward without a covering explanation. 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. The tap is bought before the top is drilled, whoever buys it.

The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. 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 template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. Where the vanity is fitted alongside a kitchen the van is standing anyway, which is a good part of why the two rooms are worth ordering together. The plumber and the van rarely want the street on the same day.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Conservation and listing conditions are common, which affects what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what stone goes on the units. Bathrooms in houses this size are big enough for a double vanity, and a top with two basins and several tap holes is a worktop by any other measure. The bathroom in a house like this is rarely where it started.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. A wall-hung unit puts the whole weight into the wall rather than onto the floor, so what the wall is built of stops being a detail. An out-of-square corner shows on a short top faster than a long one.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Ceilings are high enough that the wall units sit low against them, which leaves a tall band of wall above the worktop doing nothing. What that does to a vanity is push the whole job into a narrow depth, because a bathroom takes the same stone as a kitchen in about two thirds of the width. Basin, tap holes and splash return inside a few hundred millimetres.