Restaurant and cafe table tops in West Dulwich

Yes. West Dulwich is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE21. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. 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. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Half-landings mean the back of the house sits at a slightly different level from the front, and a knocked-through kitchen crosses that line. That measurement comes first: once the gangway is fixed the table dimension follows, and on most of these frontages that means a six hundred millimetre square for two and a seven hundred millimetre round where the room widens towards the back. Frontage, gangway and covers, in that order. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. What the room does to the base matters more than the wall.

A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. The frame needs the clearance the piece does. 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. 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.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Volume moves the price per piece, and it should. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. The programme decides the delivery, not the workshop.

The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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. Squares off one slab and rounds off another, where that is cheaper. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. A thin top over a wide plate wants a pad underneath. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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. The drawing goes to whoever has to approve it.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. No money changes hands before the template. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. The underside matters, because a hand goes under every edge.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. A stack of tops is a weight before it is a delivery.

The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. 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. Every dimension quoted is a finished dimension.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The side return was an outside toilet and a coal store before it was ever a kitchen, and the walls left over from that are half a brick thick. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. The bases stay yours and only the surface changes.