Nell still cleans two days a week and does every walk-round herself, so the person quoting your house is the person who knows how long it takes. Priya Raut leads deep cleans and end-of-tenancy work; if a letting agent has ever handed you an inventory report with a photograph of a plughole, Priya is the answer to it. Tomasz Zieliński runs the weekly housekeeping rounds and has kept the same Trowbridge round for six years — several of those clients now book their holidays around his. Bea Okonjo runs linen and laundry out of the Wallbridge workshop and irons in a way that has genuinely started arguments in this office about whether it counts as a hobby.

Most cleaning companies engage self-employed contractors: it is cheaper, the liability moves, and the person at your door may be earning less than the invoice suggests. We employ every cleaner on PAYE — nine rounds, Bea in the linen room and Nell two days a week — with holiday pay, sick pay and paid training time, and we pay above the Real Living Wage. It is the single biggest cost in the business and it is the reason our average cleaner has been here four and a half years. Turnover is the enemy of a good clean — a person who knows your house does in three hours what a stranger cannot do in five.

The manor training shows up in small, unglamorous decisions. Wood is cleaned barely damp and dried immediately, never mopped. Limestone and marble get pH-neutral only, because an acidic descaler etches them permanently and no amount of polishing brings the surface back. Glass is microfibre and distilled water, which is why there are no smears in the afternoon light. Vacuum brushes go over skirtings and frames before anything wet appears. None of it is slower once you know it; all of it is the difference between a house that looks cleaned and a house that is being looked after.

That the first visit always takes longer than the quote allows, so we quote it separately. That the thing people apologise for is never the thing that needs doing. That a house with a new baby needs the kitchen and nothing else for about four months, and saying so out loud saves everyone money. That most limescale is a water problem rather than a cleaning problem, and that a £9 shower squeegee will do more for a bathroom than an extra hour a fortnight from us. We tell people all of this, including when it costs us hours, because a client who trusts the advice stays a decade and a client who was upsold leaves by March.