Stone bar tops in Telegraph Hill

Yes. Telegraph Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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. Nothing is rushed off a tail lift onto an unsupported nose. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

A deep butler sink and a boiling tap on the same length put two heavy cut-outs within a metre of each other. There is normally room here for a genuine bar rather than a seating overhang, which means a rear counter, a small sink and a run of shelving being drawn as one piece of joinery with the stone reading across all of it. The stone is the last element of the joinery, not the first. 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. 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. A column in the middle of a bar is a decision, not a surprise.

There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a landing. 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. A bar top will not be flexed round a turn, however light it looks. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. A trade bar is fitted around opening times, so the window the van has and the window the room has are rarely the same window. Two trips to the van, one for hardware and one for stone.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement. 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. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. 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. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. 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 bar top is a shape decision with steel attached to it. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

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. 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. The stone is cut to the obstruction as found. Send the bar layout with the rear counter and any sink marked, the seating side and stool count, and the edge profile you want on the front. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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. A bar outlasts whoever specified it.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. The steel and the corbels travel that same route and go in first, so a bar is three separate carries into one room rather than a single delivery. The nose is the corner that gets caught, so it travels padded.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought.

The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. 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. 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. What carries the overhang is fixed to structure, not to lining.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn.