How Modern Butlers Have Transformed Into Do-It-All Life Managers for the Ultra-Wealthy

It’s official. Yet another global shortage has been declared, where demand outstrips supply in the luxury world. In this case, though, it isn’t a Himalayan Birkin or a bottle of Romanée Conti that’s being snapped up amid such scarcity— it’s a butler . Wealthy world travelers ready to roster their homes with top tier staff are hitting the same speed bump, with a triple whammy of factors creating the crisis. UHNW families have started to cluster in bigger groups in major cities—London, say, or New York—creating a bottleneck in premium cities. More of them have also added larger country estates to their portfolios in response to the pandemic, future-proofing life against lockdown, and need additional help to keep them spiffy. Backlogs in visas and paperwork issues only make it worse, especially as British nationals, the most in-demand of all, are now tied up in more red tape in a post-Brexit world.

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When you consider the challenging scenarios a modern butler can face, it only shrinks the pool of potential folks. Take seasoned butler Steve Ford’s experience, where his employment became more complicated as soon as his principal filed for divorce. That man’s soon-to-be ex-wife, unwilling to accept the change in circumstance, refused to leave their mansion in France. Instead, she forced the pair to divide it into competing wings and obsessively tracked her spouse’s movements from her aerie. “She was there for six months, and the actual gentleman was scared of her,” Ford says, noting that he’d help his employer hide out at home during the day using a particular subterfuge. “I used to drive him out, then come back and park the car around the back and bring him in through the swimming pool, and up the stairs to his section of the house, then lock him in and keep the key. I would then bring the car back and when she saw I had returned, she didn’t look for him. Even though he was already at the house.” It got worse when the husband moved into a new apartment and asked Ford to retrieve certain artworks for his new home. “Go there at 6 a.m. when she’s sleeping, so she doesn’t see the items you’ve taken, he said. But she called the police and said I was stealing them.”

Ford’s shenanigans are a reminder that butlers today are more than just silver platter-toting statues. Mention the term butler, of course, and it conjures an instant cliché: that formal, competent, low-key man in uniform, whether that’s Batman’s Alfred, Downton Abbey’s Carson, even Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast. It’s a misunderstanding of the true role today, as is the idea that it’s an old-fashioned relic of a position. Rather, the butler is being reinvented for the modern world with a more wide-reaching, and unusual, perch in the lives of the jetsetting global rich. He (or she) is now as likely to be dressed in a polo shirt, embroidered with a family crest or logo, as in tails, and primed to resolve an electrical outage as readily as fileting a Dover Sole. They might also be more a social sounding board than a punching bag.

“The butler is the third arm of the client. He does what the boss doesn’t have time to do,” says Ford of his position. The 58-year-old Welshman stumbled on butlering after joining the British air force, the RAF, where he was assigned to be the steward, or butler, to the station commander. He turned out to be a natural, and once discharged, made service his civvy career, and currently works for an UHNW family with their main base in London while also teaching would-be butlers the skills he’s learned over the last three decades or more. Ford says that certain classic qualities remain as vital as ever—as when he was handling silver service at a gala dinner for one client recently. “The mayor’s wife was there, and she leaned forward just as I went to take her fork and spoon, so my hand went straight down her top. But you just continue as if nothing has happened.” A devotion to your employer, and readiness to put their needs first, is also essential. A divorcé with two grown children, Ford talks matter of factly about his autistic son. “I’ve chosen not to see him at all, because I can’t commit to seeing him, say, every other Saturday,” Ford explains, unable to offer the routine that those like his son so need, “I had to make that decision.”

Yet where the butler might once have been simply taking direction, their modern counterpart may well be more seasoned in the rights and wrongs of polite society than their wealthy employer. “Today, a client will often come to you for advice, like what kind of crockery do you recommend? They know about Harrods, but they don’t know what to purchase there. You become a kind of guide for them.” Ford recalls a weekend when his principal had been invited to a shooting estate and the dress code was formal; he didn’t even own a tux. It fell to Ford to hire the various garbs and lay them out for him. He pitched in with the household’s own staff during dinner service. “As I was serving him, I was whispering quietly what to do. I was constantly coaching him.”

Ford is hardly alone. Staffing professionals we spoke with agree that the butler now occupies a strange middle ground between employee and mentor. Sara Vestin Rahmani runs the London-based agency Bespoke Bureau . Butlers with British accents, she confides, are much sought-after, especially among wealthy families in Asia or the Middle East. “They want their children to have a role model, to learn about the culture, because they’re often hoping to send them to a British school,” with the butler acting as much as a cultural bridge or primer. “You can buy a book or a British brand, but having a real-life Briton walking around in your house? That brings exclusivity,” Vestin Rahmani says. She recalls another family, this time from China, that had just moved to the U.K. “They wanted the butler to teach them about the culture, but also for their connections—getting out of hours access to shops, that kind of thing, or the private members clubs. They wanted a butler with concierge skills, who wouldn’t just guide them but get them through the door. Money can only buy you so much.” Middle Eastern clients, Vestin Rahmani adds, often have a couple of butlers who will travel with them from property to property, rather than stay back, caretaker-style, at whatever home even if the principal’s not in residence. They would perhaps travel ahead and prep the next house for the family’s arrival on its jet. “That’s not as fun and luxurious as it sounds. It’s inconvenient hours, and little sleep, and those planes are really small.”

Just as in the English country house ecosystem that Downton Abbey’s made famous, the butler retains a management role, explains Elise Lewis, who’s been placing household staff since the late 1980s; she now runs Distinguished Domestics in Los Angeles. Three decades ago, the butler’s fiefdom would have receded, focusing largely on food service and packing, but they now once more enjoy Carson-style control. It’s largely thanks to the fact that wealthy families’ real estate holdings have expanded to more than just a primary and vacation home; many UHNW families now own homes on several continents. “I have clients that might have between 50 and 100 staff across multiple residences, and because they want staff on property from 6 a.m. to midnight seven days a week, it means they need multiple housekeepers, nannies, and chefs.” In such circumstances, per Lewis, it’s the butler who acts as the de facto manager of that roster. The difference from the Downton days is there’s now a new layer between that butler and the family paying the bills. “I don’t think the butler is ever the top of the heap now—that’s somebody within the family office, or the estate manager.”

The closeness to the employer has shifted in part because it’s far more commonplace for staff to live out than in, at least in California; it’s a legacy of the state’s stringent labor laws. “People are scared to get sued about working too many hours, or not following rules of overtime pay for hourly employees,” Lewis adds. The issue for live-in staff in California is also complicated by its architecture; so says another expert in this field who spoke only to Robb Report on condition of anonymity citing ironclad NDAs. He complained that West Coast home design rarely considers the function of a house, which also complicates live-in staffing. “You can have a $50 million property, that’s 4,000 square feet and has no back of house, so it isn’t built for the reality of what the job is,” he says, “People will sooner buy properties for the staff to live in, though, than have them in the house.” He’s even helped with such challenges, acting as an intermediary to buy adjoining properties, preventing neighbors from price-gouging as they sell. (Compare luxury developments elsewhere, like Monaco’s Mareterra, where so-called accessory apartments will be incorporated into the masterplan and sold to buyers of larger homes expressly so they can billet staffers separately, but onsite.)

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In California, where many of the wealthiest might be under 40, there’s a similar need for a butler to act as much as lodestar as staff member. So says Denise Collins, who’s the third generation owner of Aunt Ann’s , a San Francisco-based staffing firm where she’s worked for more than four decades. When tech execs find themselves wealthy enough to hire household staff, they’re often aware of how to treat them; top-tier butlers and their ilk can afford to be picky and will often demur when offered the chance to interview for roles in those households. “So, those people will offer $300,000 or $400,000 for the position,” she explains, “They know the butler is the key person, the manager, who sets the tone for the entire household and keeps the stresses away—they’ll calm things down if two housekeepers are having a fight, maybe.”

The bigger challenge, per Collins, is that many folks like this have already encountered butlers but in a different setting: a hotel (see, for example, the new ad campaign from luxury chain Raffles, touting its roster of majordomos, under the tagline “The butler did it”). In commercial hospitality, there’s an army of other staffers supporting the front man or woman, who’s working as a butler; many guests overlook that fact. “They don’t want to hire enough people to deliver the service they expect, the same service they’ve experienced in their travels,” says Collins, noting that she’s about to find a new position for a seasoned estate manager who was just let go when the principals streamlined their staff from seven to three. “They thought they could take the nanny and turn her into an estate manager, and it’s just not going to work. The nanny can’t even calendar.”

Perhaps they should have taken a course themselves. That’s what Jan-Ole Herfurth experienced when he was studying to be a butler at the Netherlands-based International Butler Academy. Among his dozen-strong classmates, living together for months while they picked up key household skills, were the typical would-be butlers—a flight attendant, for example, and Herfurth himself, a twenty-something who’d been working in restaurants. But there was also a 76-year-old German man, who was CEO of a major company, who’d opted to study to better understand how staffing worked, and how he could offer a better reception to the foreign guests and dignitaries he regularly received.

The Danish-born Herfurth graduated from the program as salutatorian, and went on to spend more than eight years as the butler to a soccer player, a fellow countryman. He followed him around Europe from the U.K. to Germany to Norway as the sportsman was transferred. When that principal began a serious relationship, Herfurth’s role shifted, as his girlfriend was happy to handle many of the chores that had hitherto fallen to the butler. He resolved to look for a different way to use his skills than simply another household role and instead set up a training company, Ferm (a Danish word meaning “higher service”). But Herfurth didn’t focus on fellow household staff. Instead, he recognized that his white-glove expertise had transferable value beyond a gated mansion.

Take the eight months he spent in Doha, coaching the 16 staff of a bank connected to the royal family there, where most were originally from Asia. “They wanted it to feel like Harrods,” he explains. “My role was to train them to do European service, so that if a European guest left the bank they felt like they were in Europe, even though they were in the Middle East.” One key difference? Middle Eastern service often expects staff to be omnipresent, and within sight lines, while Europeans value discretion and near-invisibility. It took eight months—a far bigger commitment than the widely offered two-day express courses which claim to teach butlering skills. Since then, Herfurth has also trained other unlikely service-providers in his hard-learned precepts, including retail workers. “We figured out the phrases to greet a customer, like saying farewell instead of just jello,” he explains. “And when you pack a bag, instead of placing the bag on a table, you hold it on both sides to help the customer grab the handle the right way.”

Steve Ford also teaches his skills, but focuses more on those keen to follow in his exact footsteps—he’s just spent time with an 85-strong class of Chinese butlers, keen to pick up his British finesse. Still, even pros like Ford can be caught off guard occasionally, as with the dog he was asked to babysit for several weeks when its owner went away to her home in South America. “We had a video call every week, so she could talk to the dog, and I took it for a massage, a haircut and shampoo, and then the vet would come to the house once a week to do acupuncture for the dog.” One Friday, though, Fido seemed strangely listless, so Ford went quickly to the vet. After performing some blood tests, the vet said don’t fret, it’s nothing serious. The next morning, though, Steve woke up next to the dog, only to find it was dead from what turned out to be an undiagnosed brain tumor. It fell to Ford, then, to arrange the pet’s funeral, in a special pet cemetery in London.

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