Kitchen worktops in Wandsworth Common

Yes. The larger houses on the streets bordering the common support full basement or lower-ground kitchens with a big island, a separate pantry run and often a second sink. Ceiling heights are generous, so tall stone splashback panels behind the range are common. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. A short window means one pass, so the rack suits one pass.

Large Victorian villa, Edwardian detached and semi and Mansion flat. A basement is often reached by its own door under the front steps, and that door is smaller than anything else on the route. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. A settled corner leaves the bench as a real angle.

Many of these houses have a lower-ground entrance via a front lightwell with a steep flight of steps and a tight turn at the bottom, the worst carry in the area. On-street parking is permit-controlled with limited visitor bays. Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Nesting follows the route, not the other way round.

Worktop fabrication, in that order. 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. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. The batch stays together to the crate. Getting stone down a lightwell stair is the constraint here, not the room, measure the stair headroom and the turn radius before agreeing any single-piece island top.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Dry-assembled to the shape of your run. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. The relief comes out of the slab, not the fitter. Supply-only material opens at £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line rather than as a single number.

Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. An agent forwarding a drawing is not approving it. Say what the building is at the booking stage and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice become part of the plan rather than a surprise.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Join count follows the shape, not the metreage.

Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Original quarry tile is often still down under two or three later floor coverings, which is why the finished floor height is rarely what anyone expects. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Slab yield falls when the runs stop being straight.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Geometry first, then the saw.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. 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. Pieces are sized to the tightest turn on the route before anything is nested to the slab. Nothing is machined square because a plan says square.