Reception counters and desks 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. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. A commercial frontage rarely has anywhere to stop, so the unload is timed rather than assumed and the counter pieces come off first. Nothing is stood anywhere on a pavement it could be knocked from. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

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. Large houses in these streets get converted into clinics, nurseries, small offices and members' rooms, and the reception ends up in a hall that was never meant to hold a desk. Clinic counters carry a card reader and a screen at the low level. 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. A counter is worse off than a kitchen here, because it usually stands clear of the wall and has nothing behind it to hide a gap. Stone will not straighten joinery, and it will not forgive it either.

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. A counter top is one long piece with no run of cabinets to break it, so the route decides the join count before the sightlines get a vote. Trestles go up in the lobby before anything is unwrapped. 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. Loading bays belonging to the building are booked by whoever holds the lease, and that is seldom whoever ordered the counter. A height barrier rules out the tail lift before it rules out anything else.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would 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. Counters are nearly always one-offs, so the saving that comes from repeating a specification is not usually on the table here. Several desks off one slab run, or they will not match. 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. A fit-out programme puts the counter last, behind the joiner and the electrician, which is exactly when the least time is left to template it. The counter is the last trade in and the first thing judged.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. A counter has the same argument in miniature: a straight run nests kindly on a slab, and every return costs yield. The public side and the staff side take different details. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

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 lobby wall that leans shows itself along the back return, so that edge is cut to the line the wall actually takes. The front edge runs straight whatever the wall behind it does. Confirm the edge profile and which faces receive it, and tell us whether a screen, hatch or gate forms part of the counter before the carcass is built. 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. The same split runs through commercial property: a landlord fitting out a shell and a tenant fitting out their own reception want different things from one counter. The serving height comes from the standard, not from the landlord.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. 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 floor falls away across a lobby the carcass is packed level first, because the top cannot correct anything sitting under it. Where the plaster bows, the counter is drawn away from it.

Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. 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. The apertures for cable and card readers are what changes between one desk and the next, and every change is a fresh drawing rather than a variation. Apertures change from desk to desk, so each drawing is its own.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. A lobby is one of the few places a piece can be staged, so the counter comes in early and stands on trestles until the carcass is ready for it. The transaction shelf goes almost anywhere the upper top will not.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Retrofitted underfloor heating goes into the new part of the floor and stops at the old part, so the build-up changes partway across the room. A reception counter answers to the building it stands in more than to the drawing, because it is fabricated to a carcass somebody else has already built and fixed. Front of house is read from standing height and from seated height both.