Worktop fabrication 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 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. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The van is packed to suit the walk at the other end. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The stair to the lower ground floor has a turn at the bottom and a low soffit above it, and both are measured before anything is nested. Access is off a drive and through wide doors, so for once the piece size is not the constraint - the joins that go in are the ones we choose for layout and veining, not the ones the building forces. Lath and plaster is cut for, never cut into. 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. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. A square internal corner is a crack waiting.

A car that answers every floor button pressed while a piece is standing in it needs to be held on the key, and the key usually lives at a desk that wants notice. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Once the cut-outs are machined there is no going back on it. 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 unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. A timed unload is planned into the rack before it leaves.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. The annexe top comes off the main kitchen slab.

Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Oversize on the scribe edge, always. The range or Aga, the sink and the tap all need to be confirmed by model before nesting, because their clearances and hole positions set where the island can be cut. Access in a tenanted flat depends on the tenant, so the template and fitting dates are agreed with whoever actually holds the keys. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. A repeated specification comes off one batch.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. The radius goes in at the bench, not on site.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Rooms are formally proportioned with deep reveals and shutter boxes, so runs under windows are templated to what is actually there. Islands here regularly run longer than a slab, so the join is nested to sit over an internal gable and positioned so it does not run through the hob cut-out, and on a heavily veined stone we nest the island and the back run together so the movement relates across the room. The piece is made for the room the builders left.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The maximum piece is written on the drawing in millimetres.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Dry-assembled to the shape of your run.