Summerstown worktops
The kitchens we meet in Summerstown
The part of stone worktop supply and fitting in Summerstown that surprises people is how much of it is decided before anyone touches a slab. Older terraces along the Wandle corridor have small rear kitchens that stay galley-shaped, while the recent apartment schemes on the former stadium and industrial land are open-plan with a peninsula and an appliance tower. The two require completely different approaches on the same street. You do not need to know which one you have before you call. We work that out on the survey.
The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. Stone grows and shrinks a little with warmth, which is the reason joints are gapped, upstands are never wedged tight, and nothing is pinned as though it will sit still forever. A slab has a direction, and the room decides which way it runs.
Wider halls make the carry noticeably easier, and that alone can remove a join that a narrower terrace would have forced into the run. The alcoves either side of a breast break the run into short pieces, and short pieces are exactly where buying a full slab outright starts to beat buying stone by the metre. A compact kitchen puts the band ahead of the metreage.
Locally the mix runs to Victorian terrace, Interwar terrace and 2020s new-build apartment. The age of the shell tells us more than the age of the kitchen does.
