Private Housekeeping in Notting Hill

Where we work in Notting Hill

Our Notting Hill round covers the Ladbroke Estate crescents (Lansdowne, Stanley, Elgin and Blenheim) and the roads climbing between them, Clarendon, Ladbroke Grove and Kensington Park Road.

We work the Pembridge streets and Westbourne Grove, and the smaller flats around Portobello Road, which are a different kind of job entirely: compact, frequently let, turned over far more often. Holland Park Avenue forms the southern edge of the round, where Notting Hill runs into Holland Park and the housing changes character again.

What we are cleaning

Two kinds of property, and they barely resemble each other.

The Ladbroke Estate houses are the reason people move here: stuccoed, five storeys, built in the 1840s and 50s as a speculative scheme and now largely Grade II listed. The communal garden at the rear is both the defining feature and the defining constraint: equipment comes through the house, never around it, and on the crescents there is often no rear access for anything larger than one person can carry. The stucco throws the same fine dust as Belgravia's, with the same consequences for sills and shutters.

Around Portobello the scale drops sharply: Victorian terraces subdivided into flats, a high proportion of them rented, many furnished and let short. The work there is turnover cleaning rather than retained housekeeping, and it is worth saying plainly that the two are different services with different standards attached.

Access, parking and keys

Notting Hill left the Congestion Charge zone 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, which helps. Carnival does not. Over the August bank holiday weekend more than a hundred roads close, from early Sunday morning until the small hours of Tuesday, with parking suspensions beginning late on the Saturday night. Inside the zone only pre-authorised vehicles get in, residents included. We cancel and reschedule affected visits in the week beforehand as a matter of course, and we confirm it in writing rather than assume you have thought about it.

For houses on the communal gardens we agree an equipment route at the first visit and keep to it.

Services in Notting Hill

• 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.
• After-builders cleaning. Three stages, worked to your contractor's programme. One clean at the end always fails.
• Textile and upholstery care. Silk, wool and antique, tested before treated, and referred on where it should be.
• Move-in and move-out. Worked against the check-in report, because that is the document a dispute is decided on.