Restaurant and cafe table tops in Wimbledon Park

Yes. Wimbledon Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW19. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. A suspension only works if the cones and the notice are actually there on the morning, and now and then a car is sitting in the bay regardless. 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 plan on the van matches the plan on the floor. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Original quarry tiles survive under a later vinyl in many of these, and lifting the units off them shows how far the floor has fallen towards the garden end. 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. Old floors fall away and the feet take it up. Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of it. 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 shallow room decides the diameter early.

Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. 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. A lift takes a loaded frame or it takes nothing. Where the permit is a digital session rather than a paper one, somebody in the house has to start it at the hour the van actually arrives. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. A long push from the kerb is planned, not discovered.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. 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. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. Held stock is worth more than a discount. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. What one room learns, the next room uses.

A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. 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. Squares off one slab and rounds off another, where that is cheaper. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. Sharp corners are eased wherever people pass. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. 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. Bolted to your own bases, so they leave when you do.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. Every dimension quoted is a finished dimension.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. 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. Fixed seating sets the dimension it faces, so a piece against a bench is drawn to the bench instead of to a standard size. Weight low, spread wide, and it stays put.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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. Handling is where a polished edge gets damaged.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. 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. Chosen for service, not for the photographs on opening night.