Stone bar tops in St Quintin Park

Yes. St Quintin Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. What comes off the van first is whatever holds the top up. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The only window is in the side wall facing into the side return, so the room reads darker than its size and the worktop is doing much of the reflecting. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. On a bar that counts twice over, because the same obstruction has to be cleared by the stone above it and by the knees of whoever is sitting at it. Anything that flexes under the nose shows up at the join.

A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. 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. Steel for the overhang is carried in and fixed before the stone. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. The van stands for the frame as well as the top.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. A bar is nearly always the last thing added to a project, so it is templated on a visit of its own once the joinery around it has stopped moving. Where the use is hard, the surface is chosen for it. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A late bar is a separate visit and the quote says so.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. A bar laid over that is a second level rather than a wider one, so it wants a spine underneath it and a settled detail where the two heights meet. A raised tier is a second piece, priced and drawn as one. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. A column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. A home bar is discretionary work, so the edge profile, the corbel detail and the radius on the nose are worth settling properly rather than defaulting to whatever is quickest. Porcelain forgives the cleaning products a bar actually meets.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. 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. The stool positions go on the drawing before the join does.

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. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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. The stone is cut to the obstruction as found.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The original front door is narrow and the hall is often the only way in, which puts a ceiling on the longest single piece. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. A bar top is judged from a stool, not from the doorway.

Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. A bonded apron makes the piece deeper than the doorway expects.