Precision countertop fabrication · Harwick, the Bracken Vale · Est. 1996
A counter is a measurement problem that happens to be beautiful.
Strickland & Prynne fabricate quartz, granite and marble with digital templating at a quarter-millimetre tolerance — because the difference between a kitchen that photographs and a kitchen that fits is arithmetic, and arithmetic is where two bench hands from Harwick decided to be unbeatable.
Services & rates
The rate card
The card the vale’s builders price from, published for everyone. Fabrication, template and install are one number per square foot; the only extras we ever invoice are seams you ask us to add and plumbing, which we do not do and will not pretend to.
Quartz — fabricated & installed$71–93 / sq ft
3 cm engineered, non-porous, never sealed; template included
Granite — fabricated & installed$65–87 / sq ft
3 cm, polished or leathered, 15-year impregnating sealer on
Marble — fabricated & installed$89–116 / sq ft
2 or 3 cm, veins matched at every seam the slabs allow
Digital laser templateIncluded
Two hours on site; the file stays yours for life
Mitered waterfall leg or apron$150 / linear ft
Cut and glued from the same slab as the field
Old-top removal & haul-away$9 / sq ft
Off, wrapped, gone — receipted
How it goes
Measured, drawn, cut, set
The measure
The laser digitizer reads your cabinets, walls and appliances to a quarter millimetre — including every bow and out-of-square corner a tape measure would round away.
The drawing
Seam placement, edge profiles and cutout positions laid out on screen. You sign the drawing, not just the number; the stone is cut to that file or re-cut on us.
The bench
The file drives the saw, mitered pairs clamp overnight, edges come to the hand bench. The log records which bench, which day, whose hands.
The set
Old tops out and receipted, stone levelled, seams closed at 1.6 mm in epoxy tinted to your slab. One morning; the kitchen cooks again by four.
The Bracken Vale, 2025 — 2026
Runs we signed
Six from the last year. The caption tells you the stone and the tolerance that mattered — sometimes it was the wall, not the slab.
The shop
Two benches on Cardwell Row
Strickland handles the numbers, Prynne handles the edges — and between them they have shared a bench for twenty-nine years. A laser digitizer, a CNC saw, a hand bench under the window, and a policy that survives every busy season: the person who templates your kitchen is standing in it when the stone lands. If the fit is wrong, it was their arithmetic, and the recut is theirs.
Fits the first time, or the recut is ours
Every top is cut to the signed template file. If a Strickland & Prynne top does not fit because our measurement was wrong, the re-cut, the stone and the second visit are ours — as the four recuts in twenty-nine years attest, all paid.
What the card reads like in a kitchen
The vale measures twice
Our kitchen wall bows nine millimetres and nobody had ever told us — including the kitchen fitter whose cabinets followed it. The laser mapped it, the drawing showed a scribed back edge, and the quartz landed flush along the whole run. I have stopped telling the story at dinner parties only because my wife made me.
They found a grey cloud in my slab and moved the seam eight inches so it landed inside the cloud, then showed me the before-and-after drawings to prove the stone was still cut from the same bundle. The card said eighty-nine a foot; the invoice said eighty-nine a foot.
A pharmacy counter is a health inspection with a worktop. Undermount sinks, no lip, seams you could not culture anything in. The inspector ran a glove along the epoxy line, said “huh”, and wrote the pass. That is the review that matters to us.
The five we always get
Measured answers
The questions that come with every kitchen in the vale. If yours is not here, the bench line at the bottom runs seven to five and answers in fractions.
Why does porosity decide my maintenance?
Quartz is resin-bound and non-porous — wine, turmeric and beetroot sit on the surface until you wipe them, forever. Granite and marble carry micro-pores that will drink a spill given twenty minutes, so they leave here with a fifteen-year impregnating sealer that buys you exactly that: twenty minutes. Neither is wrong; one is a Sunday morning and the other is a Saturday night.
Where will my seams actually land?
On the drawing you sign. Slabs run about three metres, so runs longer than that need joints; we place them over cabinet cross-rails where the stone is best supported, and inside veining where the eye will not stop. A seam over a dishwasher or a freestanding range is a crack waiting for a loading day — we simply refuse those, in writing, on the drawing.
Honed or polished — and does it matter to the fit?
Not to the fit; entirely to the life. Polished marble shows etching as a small tragedy and honed shows it as a soft shadow; a leathered granite face hides fingerprints that a polished one wears like news. We bring three samples of the same stone to the measure so the decision happens in your light, not our showroom’s.
Do you template over the old tops?
Yes — the kitchen stays live until install morning. The digitizer reads the cabinets the old tops sit on, the drawing adjusts for the new tops’ thickness, and the only day without a kettle is the day of the set itself.
What do you not do?
Plumbing, electrical, and cabinets. We cut tap holes to your fixture’s template and hold the sink in the set; we will coordinate the morning with your plumber, and the vale’s plumbers already know our timings by heart.
Stone is patient. It will wait a fortnight to be measured properly — it will not wait a fortnight after being cut wrong.
Bench consultations Wednesdays and Saturdays · (555) 018-5506 · bench@stricklandprynne.example
Start with the measurement
Room, run lengths if you have them, and the age of the house — the older the wall, the more the laser earns its keep. The card rate and the seam drawing come back together, before anything is cut. bench@stricklandprynne.example