Kitchen worktops in Whitehall Park

Yes. Hillside Victorian terraces and villas with generous rear rooms, so the kitchen usually sits at the back of the ground floor with garden access on a 3.5m run and a peninsula. Conservation-area rules keep the rear elevations fairly intact, so extensions are modest and the original room shape survives. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew.

Victorian terrace, Victorian villa, Edwardian terrace and conversion flat. Lease conditions and the other flats in the building decide when noisy work can happen, so the fitting day has a start and a finish that are not ours to set. The kitchen is usually a long galley in a rear extension or side return, so the run lengths are the first thing we check against slab length, anything beyond roughly three metres either needs a join or a second slab, and that decision alone moves the material figure more than a few extra square metres would. Priced from the building, not from a rate card.

Steep, quiet streets with permit parking and limited turning space, where the van position matters more than the distance to the door. Front paths climb to the entrance, so everything is carried uphill on a slope before it reaches a level floor. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. An access-driven join is priced like any other join, and people are always surprised to see one on a dead straight run. Nothing about it gets estimated after the fact.

Worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation, in that order. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The prep list is not optional. On a sloped approach an A-frame is a liability, so plan a two-person flat carry with a staging point inside the door before the slab leaves the van.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. A layout templated off one wall instead of one datum will not sit right once all the pieces are down together. Real angles, not plan angles. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. The template plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Plotted, not estimated. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

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. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Access for the whole slot, or a different day. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.