Private Housekeeping in Holland Park

Where we work in Holland Park

Our Holland Park round centres on the roads either side of the park itself (Abbotsbury Road, Ilchester Place, Melbury Road and Holland Villas Road) and runs north to Holland Park Avenue and the Norland Estate.

We work Addison Road and the streets around it, the Campden Hill slopes where this round meets Kensington, and the mansion blocks along the Avenue. Royal Crescent and St Ann's Villas sit at the western edge. The park is the organising fact of the whole round: most of our clients here are within three streets of it.

What we are cleaning

Three kinds of house, all larger than the patch average.

The villas on Ilchester Place, Abbotsbury Road and Holland Villas Road are the defining stock, detached and semi-detached, generously glazed, most with mature gardens and a fair number with pools or garden rooms added in the last two decades. Glazing is the recurring job: these houses were built to look outward, and the glass area per floor is several times that of a Belgravia terrace.

Melbury Road and Holland Park Road hold the artists' houses, built in the 1860s and 70s for the painters of the Holland Park Circle. Like Chelsea's studio houses they have double-height, north-lit studios, but on a grander scale, and frequently with elaborate tiled or decorated interiors that want specialist attention rather than routine cleaning.

The third strand is the Victorian terraces and mansion flats along Holland Park Avenue and across the Norland Estate. Conventional by comparison, and the part of the round where a single weekly visit is the norm rather than the exception.

Access, parking and keys

Holland Park came out of the Congestion Charge zone along with the rest of the Royal Borough when the Western Extension was removed in December 2010. It is inside the ULEZ, as all of Greater London is.

Parking follows the Royal Borough's borough-wide permit arrangement rather than a zone system. What is particular to Holland Park is the houses: a good proportion have off-street parking or a carriage drive, which removes the question entirely, and where they do not, the streets around the park are quieter than anything on our Central London rounds.

The park is the other local factor. Through late spring, and again at leaf fall, we increase frequency on the garden-facing rooms by agreement rather than wait to be asked. It is the one predictable seasonal change on this round.

Services in Holland Park

• Private housekeeping. Retained, weekly through daily, with a named housekeeper and a named deputy.
• Deep cleaning. Seasonal, and before a house is returned to. Descaling is most of the work in London.
• Textile and upholstery care. Silk, wool and antique, tested before treated, and referred on where it should be.
• Marble and stone care. Cleaning, sealing, stain drawing and honing out etch damage. Etching is not staining.
• After-builders cleaning. Three stages, worked to your contractor's programme. One clean at the end always fails.