Stone rooms & countertops · Aldous & Wick, Sallowfield, the Merrow coast · Est. 2001
The room decides the stone. Never the other way round.
Aldous & Wick design, fabricate and set countertops for the coast’s rooms — marble where the room deserves ritual, quartz where the room will be lived on hard, granite where the cooking is real, and digital templating precise enough that nobody has to choose between beautiful and fits.
24 years on Fishergate · every room drawn before a slab is reserved · no deposit until the drawing is signed
The studio
Two rooms on Fishergate
A drawing office that faces the sea and a fabrication shop behind it that does not. Aldous draws the room — elevations, seam placement, edge profiles, where the light lands at breakfast — and Wick cuts to the drawing on a CNC the size of a dinghy. Slabs are chosen at the drawing stage, not after it, which is why nothing we have installed has ever had to be explained.
The drawing before the deposit
Every quote follows a drawn elevation of your room with the stone in it — seams, edges, veining direction — and no deposit is asked until you have signed that drawing. If what we set differs from what you signed, the difference is ours to make right.
The Merrow coast, 2025 — 2026
Recent rooms
Six rooms from the last year, photographed in their own light the week after handover. The coast changes stone — every caption names what the room asked for.
What we do
Three rooms, three stones
The kitchen that cooks
Granite where the pans land hot and the flour flies: a leathered face that forgives, a fifteen-year sealer against the spills porosity will otherwise drink, and a full-height upstand so the wall behind the hob is stone, not silicone. The room works for a living; the stone clocks in for the same shift.
The bath that steams
Marble where the ritual lives and quartz where the shampoo bottles stage their occupation — split by room, cut in the same week, set by the same pair. The bath keeps the beauty; the wet corner keeps the non-porous quartz that never seals, never stains and never minds the steam.
The counter that sells
Café servery, surgery reception, the village shop’s front line: quartz with eased edges and coved upstands, because a health inspector’s glove finds nowhere to stop and a mop finds nowhere to fail. Mitered ends where it meets the room; no seams where it meets the law.
How it goes
Four movements, every room
The room, drawn
Elevations by hand, on a drawing board that predates the studio. Light at breakfast, reach heights, where the veining should run; the drawing is the first thing you see and the last thing you sign.
The slab, chosen
Drawn rooms choose stone faster: two or three bundles walked against the drawing, at the yard, with the elevation in hand. Bookmatch pairs taped the morning you point.
The template, digitized
The laser reads the room to ±0.25 mm — coast cottages bow, and the digitizer does not care. Seam placement lands on the drawing you already signed.
The set, by hand
Old tops out, stone levelled, seams closed at 1.6 mm in tinted epoxy. The kettle works by four; the care sheet is on the counter, not in a drawer.
Fair questions
Asked over the drawing board
The five the studio gets on every first visit. Bring yours with photographs — the answers are better with the room in front of us.
Why draw the room before choosing the stone?
Because a slab chosen in a showroom is chosen in the showroom’s light. The drawing forces the decisions that actually age — where veining runs, where seams sit, which edge the morning sun will rake across — and it means the stone you reserve is the stone the room asked for. Twenty-four years in, the drawing has never once been the expensive part.
Marble or quartz for a kitchen by the sea?
Marble if you want the surface that remembers — it etches honestly, cools pastry beautifully and reads better at year ten than at day one. Quartz if you want the surface that forgets: non-porous, sealed never, indifferent to salt, wine and teenagers. We split most coastal houses: marble where the room performs, quartz where the life happens.
Does the salt air change anything?
It changes the maintenance conversation, not the stone. Honed finishes wear the coast better than polished; sealers on natural stone get renewed nearer year ten than fifteen this side of the headland; and stainless fixings get specified over plated, always. The drawing schedule carries all three lines.
What does an edge profile do to the price?
Eased is in the square foot. A mitered apron — cut and glued from the same slab so the grain runs through — is $148 a linear foot; ogee $40; bullnose $26; a full-height upstand $62. The edge is where a shop’s patience shows, so the prices are published instead of whispered.
How long, and how disruptive?
Drawing inside a week, template the week after, install about three weeks later — and the kitchen loses only one morning, the morning of the set. We template over the existing tops, and the coast’s plumbers know our timings by heart.
Rooms that live on our stone
The coast says
Aldous drew our kitchen with the morning light sketched in pencil at the corner — where it would land on a honed calacatta at eight in June. It lands exactly there. The bookmatched pair over the vanities makes the whole bathroom feel planned rather than bought, which of course is the entire trick.
The bakery servery gets hosed, hammered and inspected. Quartz, coved upstands, eased edges — two health inspections in and the glove has found nowhere to stop. When the mitered end chipped against a bread trolley, they came out and dressed it the same week, no invoice, no argument.
They moved a seam eleven inches to save a vein, and showed me both drawings side by side before I chose. Our cottage walls bow like a boat and the granite landed flush anyway. The drawing-board approach sounded quaint until it was my kitchen on the board.
A showroom sells you a slab. A drawing board sells you the room you will actually live in — the slab is just where the light lands.
Studio open Tuesday to Saturday, sea light permitting · (555) 015-9063 · rooms@aldouswick.example
Bring us the room, or photographs of it
Photographs and rough metres are enough to start a drawing; the elevation and the fixed quote arrive together, before any slab is reserved. rooms@aldouswick.example