Restaurant and cafe table tops 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. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. The bay is booked against the fitting date, not the week. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

There is a chimney breast on each flank wall, and the one in the kitchen carried a boiler flue rather than a fireplace, so the recess beside it is shallow. Parades of this period usually keep a service road or a yard behind them, so a full order can arrive at the back and the dining room stays laid up while it does. A shopfront door is the only way in on most parades. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. 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. What the room does to the base matters more than the wall.

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 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. Packaging goes back on the van rather than into the yard. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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 unload is timed between service, never through it.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. A family adding a self-contained unit is paying for the whole conversion, and the worktop is one line in a much longer job. 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. One set of decisions, repeated across the whole room. Where several adults share the cooking the kitchen is in use most of the day, so a fitting slot has to be agreed with more people than usual. 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. Buying twice costs more than buying deep once.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. 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. A spare comes off the same run or it is not a spare. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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. A thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath. Confirm how many covers go outside, and tell us whether the outdoor bases share the pattern of the indoor ones, since they often do not. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. 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. A lease term is a fair reason to specify differently.

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. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Uneven flags outside are why outdoor feet adjust.

The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Households sharing a house tend to want two prep areas rather than one, which usually means an island as well as a perimeter run. A fit-out programme runs to an opening date that does not move, so the sizes are frozen and the slab committed earlier than most jobs need. A phased opening is planned as a single order.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. What decides the cut list here is the seating plan rather than the room shape, and one repeated table size nests far better than six one-offs. The blank decides the diameter, not the other way round.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. The measurement that governs everything here is the gangway, because it caps the diameter before anybody has chosen a colour. The clearance under a fixed shelf is measured, not assumed.