Survey and Design for a Made-to-Order Kitchen

The survey and the design project are one service, not two visits. We come to your flat or house, record the room as it actually stands — walls, openings, gas, water, ducts, sockets — and draw the kitchen to those measurements: layout, cabinet sizes, worktop, appliance positions, lighting. The quotation, the build and the installation all follow from that drawing, which is why we would rather see the room than price a kitchen from a floor plan and a photograph.

The service is for anyone having a kitchen made for their own room rather than for a showroom size: a private flat or house in Moscow or the towns just outside it, a renovation run by yourself or together with a designer. If you arrive with drawings of your own, we check them against the room and hand back the differences. The workshop is ours, so a non-standard depth or a tall unit under a sloping ceiling is ordinary work for us and not a surcharge.

What the visit to your kitchen settles

A survey is not mainly a tape measure. It is a record of the room's bad habits: how far the walls are from square and from plumb, where the floor drops, how deep the window reveal is and where the sill ends, because a worktop often has to meet that sill and a radiator often has to move out of the way. A cabinet a couple of centimetres shallower than the catalogue is nothing at the drawing stage and a genuine problem on installation day.

The second part of the visit is engineering. Gas pipe, meter and column where there is one, the flue, hot and cold water, the drain and how far it falls, the ventilation duct and where it leaves the flat, the boiler and its air terminal, every existing socket and switch. In an older kitchen the sockets sit exactly where the new cabinets want to stand, so the layout and the electrics get decided in one conversation rather than two. Where a wall has to be chased, a pipe moved or a radiator shifted, we write it down: that is other people's work and money before our own starts.

The third part is you. The worktop height goes to whoever actually cooks in the house rather than to a showroom average. The sink goes where the drain will take it without building the floor up, the hob goes where the extractor can reach the duct, and the argument about which door opens first is settled on a step ladder instead of after the cabinets are hung.

What to have ready before we come

Let us reach all four walls, so clear the loose furniture and take the old worktop out if it is going anyway. If the walls are still to be plastered, tell us the finished thickness, because the last few centimetres are measured from that surface and not from the bare block. Bring the appliance list, even a rough one, and the electrical plan if a designer drew one. In a building with a gas column or a shared duct, show us where the risers stand as well.

Not every kitchen needs the full visit. If you are replacing a kitchen in the same layout, with the same cabinet sizes and the same appliances in the same places, most of it can be settled from drawings and the visit becomes a check rather than a discovery. A survey earns its place where there is gas, where a drain has to move, where the depth is not standard, and in any room where two things are competing for the same ten centimetres.

How the project turns into a price

The project you approve is working drawings, not a picture of a mood: the layout with the walking distances marked, every cabinet with its size, its depth and what it opens on to, the fronts and their finish, the worktop with its cut-outs and upstand, the appliances with the cut-outs they need, the sockets, the lighting, the extractor. Each line on those sheets is a cost, and the quotation is their sum: carcass materials and their making, fronts and their painting or foil facing, the worktop by the running metre, the appliances, then installation and connecting the appliances. What is not on the drawing does not appear in the bill, and that is the reason to do the drawing first.

A kitchen drawn from a standard layout is built for somebody else's room, and you live with the difference for ten years.

Where the money goes is not always where people expect. A worktop is priced by material and thickness far more than by shape, so an awkward plan for the kitchen does not make the stone dear, while a change of material does. Painted MDF fronts cost more than laminated ones, and they earn it on the doors you touch every day rather than on the inside of a tall unit. Soft closers and a lift-up hinge instead of a plain one are small on their own and noticeable every day for as long as the kitchen stands. We mark those choices on the drawings and say what each one does to the total, so you decide with the number in front of you instead of after the order is placed.

The drawing is also the cheap place to argue. Moving a wall on paper costs nothing, and a layout redrawn three times before the boards are cut is normal rather than a problem; a layout changed afterwards is both. Bring the conversation you have been having at your own kitchen table to the visit: where the kettle stands, whether the table seats four, whether the dishwasher is worth losing a drawer for. Send us the plan you have and where the flat is, and the next thing you will see is a drawing with the price under it.