Stone bar tops in West Putney

Yes. West Putney is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW15. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. A bar fit runs longer than a worktop run, because the frame, the support and the stone are three stages and only the last of them is quick. The van stands for the frame as well as the top. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Arts and Crafts houses have deep eaves, low windows and inglenook recesses, so the kitchen has more corners and reveals than its floor area suggests. 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. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. What the bar wraps around is templated, never assumed square.

The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. 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. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. 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. A bar fit is a day, not a drop.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as 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. A bar in constant use is a maintenance decision as well. 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. Harder use and stronger cleaning products push the answer towards porcelain or sintered stone, because a resin-bound surface is the one that shows what has been left standing on it. One detail across several rooms keeps the fixings the same.

Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. 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 sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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 support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out. 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 someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. 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 chipped front edge can be dressed in place.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. A utility or boot room usually takes a second run of stone, templated with the kitchen and fitted after 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. The overhang decides the bar, and the bar decides the stone.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. 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. The range sits in a former chimney opening, so the pieces either side of it are short, unequal and cut to brickwork rather than to a module. What carries a bar top here is rarely a kitchen carcass, so the framing underneath gets looked at before anything is measured across the top of it. Drinks stand on it for hours, which changes the material answer.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. A bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true.

Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. A counter fixed back to lightweight framing takes a sideways push as well as a downward load, and framing built for neither gets noggins let into it first. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them.