About the agency
Our history
Larchcombe was a house in Devon before it was an agency in Seattle. This is how the one became the other, and what has happened since.
Larchcombe, the house
Larchcombe stands in a steep wooded valley in mid-Devon, on land its family had farmed since the seventeenth century. The house was built in 1788 and enlarged in 1862, when the family planted the larches on the valley side that gave it, and in time the agency, its name.
Dorothy Gill went into service there in 1935, at fourteen, as a between-maid: the most junior of fourteen indoor staff, answering to the cook and to the housekeeper, and to anyone else who happened to be in the room. She learned the house from the bottom, as she put it, which in that house meant the scullery. By 1949, when she was made housekeeper at twenty-eight, the youngest the house had had, the war and the years after it had reduced the indoor staff to five, and she did a good deal of the work of the other nine herself.
She never named the family she served, in her lifetime or in her papers. Neither do we.
Seattle, 1957
Larchcombe was sold in 1956, as so many houses were, and its contents were sold at auction the following spring. Dorothy bought one lot: the bell indicator board from the servants’ hall, which had called her to the drawing room, the library and the nursery for twenty-one years, for eleven shillings.
That summer she came to Seattle as housekeeper to the youngest daughter of the house, who had married an American and lived in The Highlands, and she brought the board with her in a tea chest. In 1959 she married Harold Thayer, a ship’s chandler on the waterfront. Their daughter Joan was born in 1960, and Dorothy left service, as women in service then did.
The first card, 1961
In the summer of 1961 a friend of her former employer asked Dorothy whether she knew of a good cook. She did. The cook went to a household on Queen Anne Hill on September 4, 1961, and Dorothy, who had kept the servants’ book at Larchcombe for eight years, typed a card to record it. It is the first of a little over eleven thousand, and it is still in the oak drawer in our front hall.
No. 1Sept. 4, 1961
Cook-general.
Household on Queen Anne Hill.
Placed.
Fee $40. — Excellent.
She registered the business as the Larchcombe Domestic Agency in October 1961, because, she said, the name would mean something to the people who needed it to and nothing to anyone else. By the end of 1962 there were sixty-one cards, most of them written in the summer of the World’s Fair, when every household on the hill seemed to have guests from somewhere and nobody to look after them.
Good staff are never seen to be busy. Good agencies are never seen at all.
Tarrant Place, 1968
In 1968 the agency moved out of Dorothy’s kitchen and into the ground floor of a house of 1907 on Tarrant Place West, on the western slope of Queen Anne Hill. The Thayers bought the house in 1974. The agency has occupied its ground and first floors ever since; the family lived on the second floor until 2019; and the top floor, once the attic, is now the classroom where the Larchcombe course is taught. The bell board hangs in the front hall, where candidates wait.
The slump of 1970 and 1971 very nearly closed the agency. For most of 1971 it was Dorothy, a part-time secretary and eleven placements. It recovered as the city did, and by the end of the decade was placing a hundred people a year. Harold Thayer died in 1978. The following year Joan, who had been teaching elementary school in Tacoma, came to work for her mother, she said, for one summer.
The second generation, 1987
Joan became managing director in 1987. In the same year she made the agency’s first placement in Switzerland, a housekeeper for a Zürich family who spent their summers on the San Juan Islands and wanted to take her home with them. Placements in Zürich have followed every year since, and in Geneva since 2019.
Under Joan the agency grew with the Eastside. New households, many of them very new, needed staff and needed to be told what staff were for; Joan told them, patiently, for thirty-six years. She added estate security to the roles the agency places in 1999, lengthened its confidentiality agreement from ten years to twenty in 2004, and in 2011, the agency’s fiftieth year, wrote the Residence Code with Elspeth Tolley.
Dorothy came into the office most mornings until 1999, when she was seventy-eight, to read the new cards. She died in 2009, at eighty-eight, in the house on Tarrant Place.
The agency today
Caroline Rendle, Dorothy’s granddaughter, became managing director on July 1, 2023, and Joan became chair. Seventeen people work at Tarrant Place and one in Geneva. The agency makes about a hundred and forty placements a year, and acts for a little over three hundred households, some of whom have been clients for three generations, one of them for sixty-five years.
Since 2024 the cards have lived in the Register, which households and staff can sign in to from this site. The oak drawers are still in the hall. Nobody has suggested moving them.
Dates
- 1935
Dorothy Gill, fourteen, goes into service at Larchcombe as a between-maid, the most junior of fourteen indoor staff.
- 1949
She is made housekeeper, at twenty-eight. The indoor staff now number five.
- 1956
Larchcombe is sold. Its contents are auctioned the following spring; Dorothy buys the bell board from the servants’ hall.
- 1957
She comes to Seattle as housekeeper to the youngest daughter of the house, in The Highlands.
- 1961
September 4: the first placement, a cook-general for a household on Queen Anne Hill. The Larchcombe Domestic Agency is registered in October.
- 1962
The World’s Fair summer. Sixty-one cards by the end of the year.
- 1968
The agency moves to the ground floor of 1824 Tarrant Place West.
- 1971
The slump. Eleven placements in the year.
- 1979
Joan Thayer, later Rendle, joins her mother.
- 1987
Joan becomes managing director. The first placement in Switzerland, a housekeeper for a household above Lake Zürich.
- 1999
Estate security added to the roles the agency places. Dorothy retires from her desk at seventy-eight.
- 2004
The confidentiality agreement is lengthened from ten years to twenty.
- 2009
Dorothy Thayer dies, aged eighty-eight.
- 2011
The agency’s fiftieth year. The first edition of the Residence Code.
- 2014
The companion service for older clients begins, under Kathleen Strickland.
- 2016
Beatrice Ferrand joins to run placements in Switzerland. Geneva added in 2019.
- 2023
July 1: Caroline Rendle becomes managing director; Joan Rendle becomes chair.
- 2024
The Register opens to households and placed staff.
- 2026
The fifth edition of the Residence Code.