New York
The Hamptons season is short and absolutely fixed. Houses open at the end of May and are expected to be running — staffed, stocked, provisioned — before the family is through the gate.
Estate properties with grounds, pools, guest houses, docks and staff accommodation, occupied intensively for a few months and maintained quietly through the rest of the year. The households are seasonal in the family's presence but year-round in their upkeep.
Roles we search most often here
A household that begins its search in April is choosing from what is left. One that begins in winter is choosing from everyone. Most of the good people in this market are re-hired by the families they worked for the summer before, so the window for an outside search closes earlier than most households expect.
Hamptons houses host. Weddings, milestone birthdays, a steady rotation of friends and their children and their nannies. We look for staff who can hold a standard across a house that is twice its normal size on a Saturday, and who will still be composed in October when the house is closed for the year.
We treat the season as a deadline and work backwards from it. That usually means starting with the person who will run the house, then building a team around them, rather than filling roles one at a time and hoping they fit together in June.
Elsewhere