Private Housekeeping in Little Venice

Where we work in Little Venice

Our Little Venice round runs along Blomfield Road and Maida Avenue on either side of the canal, through Clifton Villas, Warwick Avenue and Clifton Gardens, and north to Randolph Avenue and Sutherland Avenue where it meets Maida Vale.

We work Formosa Street, Bristol Gardens and the smaller terraces behind the High Street, and the mansion blocks along Maida Vale itself. Browning's Pool and Rembrandt Gardens mark the centre of the round; most of our clients here are a few minutes' walk from the water.

What we are cleaning

Two strands, and the canal runs between them.

The canal-side villas on Blomfield Road and Maida Avenue are the defining stock: 1840s and 50s stucco, detached and semi-detached, set behind front gardens with the water at the rear. They are handsome, and they are damp-prone. Original sash windows facing still water carry condensation through most of the winter, so we treat sills, reveals and the lower panes as a weekly item rather than a seasonal one, and basements are watched year-round.

Behind them, the Warwick Avenue and Clifton Gardens terraces are larger and drier — stucco-fronted, four and five storeys, a good number converted into flats but less comprehensively than in W2.

The mansion blocks along Maida Vale are the third strand: solid 1900s and 1930s stock, portered, conventional to clean, and the part of the round least affected by the water.

Where we find damp that is structural rather than atmospheric, we say so and stop. That is a surveyor's job, not a housekeeper's.

Access, parking and keys

Little Venice is in Westminster but outside the Congestion Charge zone, whose boundary runs along Marylebone Road and Edgware Road well to the south and east. It is inside the ULEZ.

Westminster's controlled parking applies Monday to Saturday, 8:30am to 6:30pm, with no visitor permit scheme. The streets here are narrower than they look on a map and a fair number are one-way, so our teams work from a single drop rather than keeping a vehicle on the street.

For the canal-side houses, access is the local quirk. Several have gated towpath entrances at the rear, and in a few cases that is the more practical route for equipment than the front steps. We agree which door we use at the first visit, and we do not improvise it afterwards.

Services in Little Venice

• 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.
• After-builders cleaning — Three stages, worked to your contractor's programme. One clean at the end always fails.
• Move-in and move-out — Worked against the check-in report, because that is the document a dispute is decided on.