Stockwell worktops
The kitchens we meet in Stockwell
The questions that decide stone worktop supply and fitting in Stockwell are dull ones about doorways, corners and what the floor is doing, and they are asked early for good reason. The conservation-area villas have deep plans where kitchens go into the rear at ground or lower-ground level with a run plus a freestanding block, while the surrounding estates have standardised flat kitchens with a fixed sink and a boxed riser. Many villas are subdivided, so a single building can hold three different kitchen sizes. Either way, the next step is the same one: get someone out to look, and get the measurements written down.
Nothing in a house of this age is square, and the kitchen is usually the part that has been altered most often. Weight arrives as a figure per square metre and turns into a question about the floor, which is worth asking in any building where a timber span carries the kitchen. A slab has a direction, and the room decides which way it runs.
Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. The kitchen in one of these sits in the back addition and takes its daylight from one end, so the working half of the run is the darker half and a pale stone with a honed or matt face does more there than any colour with depth in it. A kitchen with no window of its own needs tone rather than colour.
What the rooms sit inside, mostly, is Georgian and early Victorian villa, Victorian terrace, Large postwar estate and Interwar block. The template reads them differently even where the layout looks identical.
