Stone bar tops in West Hampstead

Yes. West Hampstead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW6. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. 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. The van stands for the frame as well as the top. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Boxed sash frames swallow a hundred millimetres of wall on each side of the opening, so the wall between a window and a corner is shorter than a plan makes it look. A bar in one of these houses is either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the two behave differently. The frame is built to the room and the stone answers to the frame. 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. 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 corbel never lands where a knee goes.

Two people will walk a two-metre piece in through a front door; the same hall with a three-metre piece wants four, purely because nobody can let go halfway. 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. Where the route is tight the bar gains a join behind a corbel. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. 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. A bar fit is a day, not a drop.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. The overhang is checked against the frame that exists. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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 bar in constant use is a maintenance decision as well.

Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. 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. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

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. 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. The bar is packed level off the frame, not off the floor. Send the length you want, the number of stools, and photographs walking from the pavement through to the room, including the cellar stair if the bar is going down there. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. Where the person choosing it is not the person who will lean on it, the seating height is set to a standard rather than to whoever happens to be standing in the room. The overhang is signed off by whoever pays for the steel.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. 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. The bar length answers to the seats, not to the wall behind it.

Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Original shutter boxes survive in the reveals of the front rooms and stand proud of the plaster, and that is the line a run under the window has to be scribed to. A bar in a house of this age is usually either the end of a through-lounge or a cellar conversion, and the cellar is the harder of the two because the headroom fixes the counter height before anybody else gets a say. A cellar bar is set to the headroom first.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Where the walls have been dry-lined over the old lath there is a void behind the board and no solid fixing until a batten is found. A bar top put into a room like that is an overhang question first, because the nose has to carry people leaning on it long after the slab has stopped being interesting. The bar is set level to itself and packed off the frame.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Chimney breasts are often taken out at ground level and left standing above, so the middle of the run is newer wall than the two ends of it. None of that stops a bar being fitted level, but it does mean the top is set to a datum of its own and packed off the frame rather than followed down to the floor. Everything under the nose is agreed before a slab is chosen.