You Called For Me, Sir?

Don't look for it in your local classifieds, but a new kind of help-wanted notice is rippling the labor market. "House Manager required … with experience managing complex properties and their staff," announces one European estate. "Needs to be able to drive a Bentley on regular airport runs," bids another job description on GreycoatPlacements.co.uk.

Quaint as it sounds, the family butler is back. Thanks to unprecedented sums of money sloshing around the international economy, the run on high-end household help has grown frantic. "The demand is huge, and we just can't keep up," says Charles MacPherson, whose eponymous firm trains top-tier domestic help. Insiders reckon there are some 2 million butlers padding down the world's finest corridors, a quarter of them serving in England alone. Yet increasingly, butling knows no boundaries. Recent postings on GreycoatPlacements.co.uk ask for help in the Alps and the United Arab Emirates, where the required talents include fluency in Russian, mastery of haute Japanese cuisine and tending an "Italian Scented Garden." "There are more millionaires and billionaires than ever, and they've reached the stage in their lives that they want to live like millionaires and billionaires," says MacPherson. "They are acquiring planes, ski chalets, summer homes. But who's going to manage them?" Indeed, minding the rich has never been more demanding. "The butler no longer carries the pistols at dawn," says Jane Urquhart, the principal of Greycoat Academy, which grooms butlers. Instead he—and, increasingly, she—is the domestic answer to a chief operating officer who can cook, chauffeur the kids and press a French cuff as well as negotiate with contractors and keep the books balanced, preferably on Microsoft Excel. And for the new rich, who still may be mystified by the difference between a vichyssoise and a vernissage, a pedigreed butler is a godsend. "Often you're quite vulnerable when you've come into wealth," says Urquhart. "The butler can be a perfect guide to how to be looked after."

As the expectations for butlers have soared, so has their pay scale. Forget about those dowdy widowers who toiled like chattel and slept in the basement. Today a starting butler can earn $50,000 a year, while veterans command up to $120,000—plus perks and a pension. In the brave new world of the affluent, even Jeeves needs looking after.

© 2007