The price of privilege

"You start off with somebody who cleans your house and then you typically have a handyman," says Pearl, whose clients are a 50-50 mix of inherited wealth and the newly rich. "You generally add a chef or cook, and if you have kids you have childcare. Then you get into things like drivers. Then you've got so many people that you need to manage that you look into a household manager."

There is no reliable data on the number of private household staff working in the U.S. An unknown portion works off the books, and others are tracked under "janitorial services" or "child care workers." But industry experts say the market is growing — in more ways than one.

"There is more demand for higher-skilled trained professionals," says Mary Louise Starkey, chief executive of the Denver-based Starkey International Institute for Household Management. "Salaries are higher. Ten years ago, a household manager would probably be earning about $50,000 a year. An entire budget was $250,000. Now it can easily be $800,000 a year."

Maureen Drum Fagin, director of career services at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, says that depending on experience and region, full-time, private chefs can make up to $150,000 per year. That's in contrast to the $40,000 Manhattan sous-chefs with five years of experience typically earn.

But it's not a cake-walk, since these homeowners are often "people in the world of business who have moved mountains," Starkey says. No desire is too great — or too idiosyncratic.

Starkey recalls a client who owned a massive Connecticut spread but used it only about 60 days out of the year. In the state, homeowners install fences to keep the deer off their property. But this family found the fences obtrusive. So upon entering the estate, their driver called the groundskeeper, who removed them for the duration of the family's stay.

Indeed, "service is in the eye of the beholder," says Starkey, "and it has to be in their style."

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