Restaurant and cafe table 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. 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. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Conservation and listing conditions are common, which affects what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what stone goes on the units. That is fine, but it has to be drawn: a room of one-offs prices differently from a room of repeats, and the difference is real rather than a markup. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in. 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. 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. A thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath.

The lift is only part of the route, and the corridor from the lobby to the flat door often holds a tighter turn than the car does. 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. Polished faces never travel touching each other. 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. The bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. 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. Orders are counted in pieces and never in metres. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. 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. Ordered as a set, so the set matches.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. 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. Veining is laid out so no two pieces read as a pair. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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. Uneven flags outside are why outdoor feet adjust. Send a plan of each room with its table sizes against it, and say which covers are outdoors so the material can be split before anything is priced. Access in a tenanted flat depends on the tenant, so the template and fitting dates are agreed with whoever actually holds the keys. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. Bolted to your own bases, so they leave when you do.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Lime plaster on nine inch brick has been patched with gypsum wherever a radiator or a socket has moved, and the two finish at different depths. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. The underside matters, because a hand goes under every edge.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. 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 a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. The clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed.

Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. The lower ground floor has a lower ceiling than the floors above it, so the kitchen is a room that is wide but not tall. Hospitality in an area like this is often a converted house, so the dining space is several small rooms rather than one and the sizes vary room by room. A rear yard is worth an hour of the day.

Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. The measurement that governs everything here is the gangway, because it caps the diameter before anybody has chosen a colour. Room by room, since no two of them are the same.