Worktop fabrication in Hampstead

Yes. Hampstead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW3. It is run from the Watford side, covering Hertfordshire & North London. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. The load plan follows from it. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. Every join over a gable, clear of every cut-out. 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.

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. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. Once the cut-outs are machined there is no going back on it. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop design & quotation and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Same slab run, or it is not a match. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Same slab run, or it is not a match.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. The drawing decides it, not the fitter. The sink and hob need to be on site and the run layout fixed before we start cutting, because moving a hob after the join position is set means recutting the whole piece. 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. Sink and hob are dry-fitted on the bench before dispatch, whoever supplied them. Changes cost a piece, not a tweak.