Plenty of the families we work with have three, four, or five residences. A London townhouse, a country estate, a villa in the Mediterranean, perhaps a chalet and an apartment somewhere in North America. The properties are beautiful. The calendar is predictable enough — the London house in the autumn and winter, the country house at weekends and school holidays, the Mediterranean villa in summer.
What is never straightforward is staffing it.
Multi-residence households are not three separate household problems. They're a single, interlocking problem that requires a different approach. The households that run well across multiple locations tend to share a small set of characteristics. The ones that don't tend to be making the same handful of mistakes, year after year.
Here's what we've learned.
Why Multi-Residence Is Different
Staff transitions, not staff placements
In a single-residence household, hiring is relatively clean. Candidate fits the role, joins the team, stays or leaves. In a multi-residence household, staff either travel with the family, stay resident at one property, or rotate between properties on a schedule. Each model has trade-offs, and most households end up with a blend of all three.
Residence-specific skills don't transfer cleanly
A senior housekeeper who's brilliant in a Georgian London townhouse might be underwhelming in a 20-bedroom country estate with 60 acres. A butler who runs the London house flawlessly might struggle with the logistics of a villa in Ibiza where contractor relationships and Spanish employment law become daily concerns. The skills are related, but they're not identical.
Institutional knowledge fragments
When staff are tied to one residence, the knowledge of how the family actually likes things — which towels, which silver, which florist, which wines — gets concentrated in that residence. When the family moves between residences, that knowledge doesn't travel with them. Every new residence is, in effect, a slightly different household that looks the same from the outside.
Co-ordination overhead scales non-linearly
Running two houses is not twice the work of running one. Running three is not three times the work. The overhead scales with the square of the property count — every additional property multiplies the number of interfaces, rotas, coordination calls, and contractor relationships.
Most families underestimate this by a factor of two or three.
The Three Staffing Models
Every multi-residence household we work with runs some combination of these.
Model 1: Travelling Staff
The family has a core senior team that travels with them. Typically the house manager, private chef, nanny or governess, and perhaps a valet or lady's maid. When the family is in London, the travelling team is in London. When they move to the country, the team moves with them.
Strengths: Continuity of service. The family's preferences are known. Institutional knowledge travels.
Weaknesses: Expensive — you're paying for premium staff who are only using one residence's infrastructure at a time. Hard on staff lives. Travelling staff often don't last more than three to five years in the pattern before family or lifestyle reasons force a change.
Model 2: Resident Staff
Each residence has its own permanent team. Staff don't travel. The family arrives, the house is ready, staff are in place.
Strengths: Staff have local knowledge, local relationships with contractors, local language fluency. Residence-specific expertise is deep. Retention tends to be better because staff aren't constantly on the road.
Weaknesses: Institutional knowledge doesn't travel between residences. Every property has its own rhythm and standards. The family has to re-establish preferences at each property unless someone is deliberately coordinating.
Model 3: Rotating Staff
Specific staff rotate between two or three residences on a defined schedule. Often junior housekeeping roles, kitchen support during entertaining-heavy seasons, or seasonal drivers.
Strengths: Flexible, cost-efficient for seasonal households. Staff get variety.
Weaknesses: Only works for roles where residence-specific knowledge matters less. Tricky to retain — rotating staff often use the role as a stepping stone rather than a career.
Most serious multi-residence households use all three: travelling senior staff (perhaps three to five people), resident junior staff at each property, and a small rotating team for seasonal peaks.
The Co-Ordinator You Need (And Probably Don't Have)
The single most important hire for a multi-residence household is the person who sits above the residence-level house managers and coordinates across all of them. Title varies — group house manager, principal's EA, estate director, chief of staff, or more commonly a senior estate manager — but the function is identical.
What they actually do:
- Hold the shared inventory view: what's at each house, what needs replenishing where, which items travel, which stay
- Coordinate the family's calendar across residences and brief each house ahead of arrivals
- Manage cross-property staff — who's travelling, who's covering leave, who's filling in during transitions
- Own the consolidated household budget across residences
- Run the contractor relationships that span properties: security, audit, insurance, compliance, group-level buying
- Interface with the family office or senior PA on behalf of every house manager
- Spot the drift — uneven standards, uneven spending, uneven morale across residences
Without this role, multi-residence households inevitably drift. The London house gets all the attention; the Mediterranean villa becomes the neglected property that runs 30% over budget every year and no one notices. Or the country estate is beautifully run and the London townhouse limps along because no one senior is actually looking at it.
Who's good at this role? Typically someone with ten-plus years in senior private service, multilingual, comfortable with cross-jurisdiction employment law basics, strong numerically, very organised, and with the diplomatic skill to manage house managers who are each senior in their own right. Salaries in 2026 for this role in a serious multi-residence household run £150,000–£280,000, often with significant travel-linked benefits.
They are not easy to find. We run roughly eight of these searches a year and consider ourselves busy.
The Mistakes We See Most Often
No single co-ordinator — "the principal's EA does it"
This works until it doesn't. EAs with a broad executive remit rarely have the bandwidth or the specific household skills to run multi-residence operations well. When things are smooth, nobody notices. When a problem hits (security incident, staff crisis, major maintenance event), the EA is overwhelmed and the residences suffer.
Every house manager operating in isolation
House managers naturally optimise for their own residence. Without someone holding the cross-residence view, they end up duplicating work, competing for the family's attention, and developing inconsistent standards. The family arrives at property B and finds it runs completely differently from property A, in ways that feel unfamiliar.
Staff travel without proper employment structure
Travelling staff often end up in employment-law grey zones — technically employed in jurisdiction X, working in jurisdictions Y and Z, occasionally ending up in tax problems nobody planned for. Good households now structure travelling employment through the principal's family office or a service company, with legal review for each jurisdiction the staff work in.
Seasonal scaling up and down without forward planning
The Mediterranean villa is quiet for nine months and heaving for three. The country estate needs a full shoot-season team for six weeks. Families who plan this in January have no problem staffing it in July. Families who start thinking about it in May spend the season in crisis mode.
Treating each residence's budget as separate
Procurement, insurance, security, staff agency relationships, and maintenance contracts all benefit enormously from group-level buying. Households that tender these individually per residence overpay significantly. We've seen the gap run to 15–20% of total household operating cost.
What "Good" Looks Like
The best-run multi-residence households we work with share a few characteristics:
- One senior co-ordinator owns the cross-property view and is genuinely empowered to intervene in any residence.
- Each residence has a capable, tenured house manager with clear autonomy over day-to-day operations and a clear escalation path.
- A shared digital system (often a custom dashboard or a well-configured Notion/Monday-type tool) holds inventory, budgets, staff, and calendar across all properties.
- Employment is structured professionally — travelling staff have contracts that handle the jurisdictional complexity, not handshake arrangements.
- Quarterly reviews bring the residence teams together (virtually or in person) to surface cross-cutting issues and reset standards.
- Transitions between residences are briefed — the house being moved to knows what's coming, what the family's preferences are right now, and what's changed since last time.
A Final Thought
Multi-residence life looks luxurious from outside and often feels logistically exhausting from inside. The families who enjoy it — rather than spending half their time managing it — are the ones who've built a proper staffing structure around it. That structure costs money. It also saves multiples of what it costs.
If you're managing two or more residences and feeling the friction, get in touch. The conversation about getting the structure right is the single highest-leverage conversation most multi-residence households ever have.