Kitchen worktops in Hampstead

Yes. Two very different jobs sit side by side: listed Georgian townhouses where the kitchen is still in the semi-basement with low ceilings, stone floors and structural piers breaking up every run, and larger detached villas where the kitchen has moved to a rear garden room with a genuine island. Basement runs are short and interrupted by chimney breasts, so the cutting list is long even when the room is not. 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 van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. We would rather ask than guess.

Georgian townhouse, Victorian villa, Arts and Crafts house, 1930s modernist block and mansion block. Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. Alcoves either side of the breast are rarely the same width and rarely parallel, so each one is templated as its own piece with its own scribe. No stone is ever cut from a plan.

Steep hills, single-track lanes, cobbled and stepped sections that no van gets near, and a CPZ with almost no loading space anywhere near the Village. Lower-ground kitchens are reached down an external area staircase with a tight quarter turn at the bottom, which is normally the narrowest point on the whole job. Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. The laser records it along with everything else.

Worktop templating, worktop design & quotation and worktop installation, in that order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Comparing quotes only works when they itemise the same things, and this is where the differences usually hide. Material is the slab only, and it says so. Listed-building consent shapes what you can fix to a wall, so upstands often replace tiled splashbacks and the area steps dictate slab sizes long before the kitchen layout does.

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. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. One datum for the whole room. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. Send photographs of every corner of the room and it gets priced properly first time. Better on the quote than in a variation. 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.

Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. Material is quoted as a supply range and the labour lines separately, because an installed rate per square metre is not a real number. Nothing payable until template. 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.