Households and placed staff, at any hour: (206) 014-6182

LarchcombeSeattle · Est. 1961

Roles we place

House managers

A house manager runs a private house the way a good general manager runs a small hotel, except that the guests own it, the staff live in it, and nobody may ever be seen to be busy.

At a glance
Usually engaged byHouseholds with four or more staff, or more than one residence
Live-inAbout two in five
Our searchRetained, about ten weeks
Placed in 2025Fourteen

What a house manager does

The house manager is the one person in a household who answers to the principals for everything else. In a house with a full staff, that means the staff themselves, their hours, their training and their happiness; the household’s budget and accounts; its suppliers and contractors; the maintenance of the house and its systems; the calendar of the household’s year; and the hundred small decisions a day that the family would rather not know were made.

In practice, the house managers we place are responsible for some or all of the following:

  • Recruiting, training and leading the household staff, with our help where they want it, and holding the staff file for each of them.
  • Setting and keeping to the household budget, paying its suppliers and reporting to the principals or their family office each month.
  • Commissioning and supervising contractors, from the window cleaners to a two-year renovation.
  • The household’s calendar: the family’s travel, the opening and closing of a second house, entertaining large and small.
  • The house’s systems and its security, with the estate security team where there is one.
  • The inventory: furniture, art, silver, wine and wardrobes, and the insurance schedules that list them.

Where a household has more than one residence, we usually call the role estate manager, and it usually involves a good deal of travel and a second house manager, or a caretaker, in each other house.

The shape of a household

The principalsthe family House managerruns the house, holds the budget Butlerservice, cellar, silverHousekeeperrooms, linen, wardrobeChefkitchen, menus, suppliersEstate securitygate, grounds, travelChauffeurcars, schedules Nannyreports to the parents Groundscontracted, seasonal Housemen, laundress, second housekeepers and seasonal staff report to the head of their department. Solid line: line management. Dotted: reports directly to the parents. Fine dots: supervised, not employed.
Fig. 1 How a large household is usually arranged. Everyone reports to the house manager except the nanny, who reports to the parents. Gardeners and grounds staff are usually contracted, but the house manager supervises them.

Who we look for

The house managers we put forward have at least eight years in private service, three or more of them running staff, and have held a household budget of at least a million dollars a year. Many were butlers or executive housekeepers first; some came from the management of a fine hotel and learned, usually with some surprise, that a private house is a much harder thing to run.

We look for judgment above everything: the ability to tell a principal, politely and in time, that something they have asked for cannot be done, and to tell the staff, kindly and at once, that something they have done must not be done again. We look for people who can read a balance sheet and a dinner table with equal care. And we look for discretion so complete that their former principals’ friends cannot remember having met them.

Every search for a house manager is retained. Neil Fairbanks or Caroline Rendle visits the household, walks the house with the principals and, where there is one, the departing house manager, and writes the brief. We then search our own register first, and approach, with great discretion, house managers whom we know to be open to a move.

We will not approach a house manager who works for a household we act for, whether or not we placed them there. We tell every household this at our first meeting, because the rule protects them as surely as it limits them.

A shortlist is usually three candidates. Each meets the principals twice, once with us and once without, and the preferred candidate spends a paid day in the house before an offer is made. We take up at least two references from former principals ourselves, by telephone, and our vetting team checks everything else.

Living in, and the Residence Code

About two in five of the house managers we place live in, usually in a cottage or apartment on the property. All of them, living in or not, are responsible under the Residence Code for the household’s arrangements for its staff: keys and codes, visitors to the staff quarters, the record of hours worked outside the agreed schedule and, where the household requires it, the keeping of staff telephones during duty hours.

The house manager also holds, in a sealed envelope, the first passphrase each member of staff is given for the Register, so that a member of staff who has forgotten theirs at eleven at night need not wait until the office opens.

Terms

House manager and estate manager searches are made on our retained terms: a retainer on instruction, credited in full against the placement fee. Our fees and guarantees page sets out the figures.