Stone bar tops in Wimbledon Village

Yes. Wimbledon Village 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. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone 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. A red route buys minutes and a bar top needs hours. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

A townhouse is tall and narrow with the kitchen at the bottom, so every piece goes down a staircase rather than along a hall. 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. Piece length is capped by the way in and the support follows. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. The support plan is drawn at the same time as the cut-out.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. Packaging and offcuts go back the way the top came in.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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 evening use is what the piece is sized for. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. Bars are quoted as their own item, never as extra metreage.

Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. 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. Where the two levels meet is a detail, not an afterthought. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. A bar top will not correct a frame that is out of true. 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 two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. 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.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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. Fixings go into timber that was put there for them.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. The seating side is the part that decides the piece, because a stool at the open end puts a load on a corner that a wall would otherwise have been carrying. Stools need floor as well as knee room, and both are drawn.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. 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. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. The stair to the lower ground floor has a turn at the bottom and a low soffit above it, and both are measured before anything is nested. Lengths run past what a single slab gives, so a break is designed in from the start, placed over support and kept clear of every stool position before anything is nested. A garage floor slopes and the frame takes that up.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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. What was drawn and what was built are compared at template.