The Housekeeper and the Standards of the Linen Cupboard

The condition in which a serious residence presents itself, day after day, to the family which lives in it and to the guests it occasionally receives, is not the work of any single visible act. It is the product of a great many small disciplines, kept patiently and without fuss by a member of staff whose office in the thoughtful house is, in our view, second in importance only to the chief of staff. The housekeeper is the quiet author of the daily condition of the residence, and the household which has appointed the right housekeeper has acquired the foundation on which everything else in the front of house and the family rooms rests.

We are sometimes asked, by principals at the start of establishing a senior household team, what to look for in a housekeeper of the right standing. Our counsel is that the relevant qualities are largely invisible to the casual interview. The candidate's command of the standards is best assessed in the linen cupboard. It is heard in the conversation about the rotation of the bed linen, in the description of how the silver is cleaned and stored, and in the unhurried account of how a particular stain on a particular fabric was lately addressed. A housekeeper who can speak about such matters with quiet precision is a housekeeper whose other disciplines will be of the same order.

The housekeeper holds, in any serious establishment, the operational authority over the housemaids and the day staff of the residence. This authority is exercised, in the houses we admire, with a particular quality of thoughtful firmness. Standards are made plain, errors are corrected without drama, and the junior staff are taught, by example as much as by instruction, the disciplines on which their own future careers will rest. A housekeeper of the right standing is, in this sense, a school as well as an office. The household which has the privilege of such a person at its head produces, over the years, a small line of well trained successors who go on to staff the establishments of the principal's friends.

We close on a point about recognition. The work of the housekeeper is, by its nature, almost entirely invisible when it is done well; it becomes visible only at the moments of small failure which the housekeeper has, in fact, prevented. We counsel principals to make a point of recognising the work that is not seen. Do so through long tenure, fair remuneration, and the conversation which acknowledges, from time to time, that the condition of the house is a gift the housekeeper makes to the family every day.