West Norwood worktops
The kitchens we meet in West Norwood
We plan the worktop jobs in West Norwood around access, ceiling height and what the kitchen has already been through, none of which shows up in a phone call. Steep terraced streets where houses are often split into flats, so the kitchen is a rear room of about 2.4m by 3.5m with a run and a return and no space for an island. Whole houses take a shallow rear extension because gardens rise steeply away from the building. Nothing above needs settling before you get in touch. It gets settled with a tape measure, in your kitchen, in West Norwood.
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. Every slab in a yard began either as a block sawn off a quarry face or as a pressed powder fired in a kiln, and almost everything that follows from the choice comes out of that single difference. The light in a room shortens the shortlist faster than the budget does.
Where the kitchen has taken the bay, the end of the room is three facets of glass set at angles and there is no straight wall left to finish against. A matt or honed face suits a period room better than a mirror polish, and it is also the finish that hides the fine dust an old house produces all year round. Four visible edges make the profile part of the design.
The kitchens here sit in Victorian terrace, Victorian villa, 1960s estate block and Interwar semi. None of them is harder than the others; they are awkward in different ways.
