Reception counters and desks in Strawberry Hill

Yes. Strawberry Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW1, TW2. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. The tail lift needs pavement, not simply a space. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

The boiler has usually been moved out to the garage or the utility, leaving a capped flue and a run of dead pipework in the kitchen wall. Practices in this stock are usually converted houses on or behind an interwar parade: a dental surgery, a veterinary practice or a small office with its reception in what was the front room. Public counters are specified for wear at the front edge. 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. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. The template is taken to the carcass as built.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. A long top on edge sweeps wider than the crew carrying it. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. The upper counter is the longest piece on the van, so the tail lift needs the full swing radius clear on the pavement. Outside opening hours is usually when the kerb is free.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A second kitchen or a kitchenette in an annexe is a small job with the same fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines as a large one. Where an operator is fitting out several receptions, the counters come off one slab run so the desks read as a set rather than as neighbours. The counter is the last trade in and the first thing judged. Where an annexe has been built or converted, its floor and its walls are newer than the main house and behave differently under the same run. A fit-out programme puts the counter last, behind the joiner and the electrician, which is exactly when the least time is left to template it. Apertures change from desk to desk, so each drawing is its own.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. A counter reads as one plane or as several, and that is a drawing decision. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

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. What a counter is scribed to is the joiner's carcass rather than the plaster, which is why it is templated after the carcass is fixed and never before. Twist in a carcass shows first at the transaction shelf. Confirm whether the reception is at ground level or up the stair, and send the carcass drawing with the chimney breast and any bay recorded on it. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. The same split runs through commercial property: a landlord fitting out a shell and a tenant fitting out their own reception want different things from one counter. A landlord's shell and a tenant's desk are two separate briefs.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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 floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. A long counter magnifies every millimetre the carcass is out.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. A lobby is one of the few places a piece can be staged, so the counter comes in early and stands on trestles until the carcass is ready for it. Where the lift will not take it, the join is designed rather than risked.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Air bricks that once ventilated the original floor now open into the extension, and one of them is generally sitting behind a base unit. The carcass is built around a chimney breast or into a bay, so the counter is drawn to a shape the joiner had to invent rather than to a rectangle, and the return between the upper counter and the transaction shelf rarely nests neatly against the long piece. A converted front room gives a lobby with no depth to it.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. An external corner on a counter is seen from both sides at once, so it is mitred rather than butted and the pattern is carried round it. Where the counter turns, the pattern turns with it.