Villa Cleaning in Geneva

What is the difference between regular upkeep and a deep clean?

They are distinct services and it is worth not conflating them when asking for a quote, because they have neither the same duration nor the same purpose.

Regular upkeep maintains a standard already reached. It covers what is seen and touched: floors, sanitary ware, kitchen, dust, interior glass depending on frequency. Its strength is repetition — a villa cleaned weekly never develops old limescale or baked-on grease, so every visit stays short. Common frequencies run from one visit a week to two or three on permanently occupied houses with children.

A deep clean starts from accumulated backlog. It treats what routine work does not touch: inside cupboards, tops of wardrobes, full glazing including rebates, blinds and shutter boxes, heavy descaling, oven and extractor hood degreasing, radiators, ventilation grilles, light fittings. It is ordered for a spring reset, at the end of a seasonal let, before a move, or after building work. It often needs several people across one or two days, and it resets the baseline so that regular upkeep can work as intended.

How are keys and access handled?

This is the first question an owner asks, and it deserves a precise answer rather than a reassuring phrase. Entrusting access to your home is not an administrative detail.

Three arrangements are possible, chosen to suit your routine. You are present at each visit, which suits a weekly daytime clean. You entrust a set of keys, which is identified by a code rather than by your address, kept away from the vehicle and issued only to the person assigned to your house. Or access runs through a system you control — a code, a key box, a smart lock — which leaves the ability to grant and revoke entirely with you.

In every case the name of your regular cleaner is given to you and a replacement is never improvised: if the usual person is away you are told before the visit, not after. That continuity also makes the work better, because someone who knows the house knows where limescale recurs and which door sticks.

Delicate materials and what must never be done

Most irreversible damage in a villa comes not from an accident but from an ordinary product applied to a surface that cannot take it. Four cases recur constantly.

Marble and polished limestone tolerate no acidic product: a bathroom descaler, a vinegar-based cleaner, even lemon juice leaves a permanently dull mark. Oiled parquet must not be washed with plenty of water or an alkaline detergent, which dissolves the finish and lightens the grain. Polished concrete is harmed by acids and abrasives, which open the porosity and lock stains in for good. Brushed stainless steel scratches against the direction of the brushing and the mark never comes out.

The practical consequence is methodological: coverings are recorded during the quote visit, written into the file, and the kit is composed accordingly. Where identification is uncertain, a test is run on an inconspicuous area before any treatment. That caution costs a quarter of an hour; refinishing a marble floor costs immeasurably more.

Are the outdoor areas included?

Not by default, and it is better said plainly than left open until the invoice. Outdoor areas are defined item by item in the quote, because their workload varies enormously from one house to another.

Commonly added: the terrace and its furniture, poolside areas and the pool house, the garage, the driveway, balustrades, the gate and the conservatory from outside. Each has its season — a timber deck needs a treatment in spring that makes no sense in January, a poolside is worked intensively from May to September and barely at all afterwards.

What does not fall within cleaning: garden maintenance, pruning, mowing, tree work and the technical maintenance of the pool, which are separate trades. We do not offer them, and we would rather say so than blindly subcontract a service whose quality we could not stand behind.

How many people, and how long, for a villa?

The arrangement depends on the objective. For regular upkeep one person is usually enough and continuity matters more than numbers: the same cleaner, every week, for an agreed duration. She knows the house, which makes her significantly faster than a team discovering it.

For a deep clean the logic reverses: two to four people across one or two days, split by zone, working top down and dry to wet so nothing already finished is dirtied again. It is the only way to treat a large house without spreading the work across a week.

On an occupied villa the calendar matters as much as the method. Visits are set around your routine: daytime if the house is empty, early morning if children leave for school, never during a reception. It is one of the reasons we ask for a survey before quoting — the figure also depends on the window available.

What happens if something is damaged?

In a villa the risk is not theoretical and denying it would not be credible: there is glass, stone, sometimes artwork and valuable furniture. So the question is not whether we promise nothing will ever happen, but what happens if it does.

The team carries professional liability insurance, and both the cover and the company registration number appear on the quote. That is worth verifying systematically, with us as with anyone else: regular access to a house by an uninsured individual transfers the risk to the household, often without the owner realising.

In practice any incident is reported the same day, before we leave, and never discovered by you later. We prefer immediate disclosure, including for minor damage, to a delayed discovery: it lets the matter be handled in trust rather than in suspicion. Specific rooms can also be excluded from the scope at your request — a display cabinet, a study, a wine cellar — and that exclusion is written down.

Seasonal lets, second homes and long absences

A significant share of villas in this canton are not occupied continuously, and that changes the nature of the service. On a second home the issue is not everyday soiling but the state of a closed house: settled dust, stale air, limescale in rarely used traps, damp marks in unheated rooms.

Two services answer that. Reopening before your arrival: the house is opened and aired, dusted throughout, water drawn off at little-used outlets, sanitary ware descaled and beds made, so that you walk into a house that is ready. And closing down after you leave: full clean, fridge emptied and defrosted, bins removed, textiles stored, closures checked.

On a seasonal let the rhythm is tighter: cleaning slots between two stays in a short window, sometimes the same day. The constraint is then timing reliability rather than volume of work, and it requires a reserved slot rather than an on-demand call.

How is a villa quote prepared?

We ask for a survey, and it is not a sales formality. A villa quote given over the telephone cannot be fixed, because the two variables that determine the figure — the number of technical areas and the nature of the coverings — cannot be conveyed reliably in conversation.

The visit takes around thirty minutes. We record the levels, the number of bathrooms and kitchens, the floor coverings room by room, the glazed area and its height, blinds and their boxes, the outdoor areas you want included, and any rooms to exclude. We also note access constraints and your preferred timing.

The resulting quote names the items, states the frequency chosen, indicates what is extra and what does not fall within cleaning, and gives a fixed figure. It remains free and without obligation. For regular upkeep it is revised only if the scope changes — a bathroom added, a conservatory built, an outdoor area included seasonally.

What is included by formula

In a villa the technical spaces — laundry, pool plant room, boiler room, garage — represent real time and they are inspected at a handover. We list them explicitly in the quote rather than discovering them on the day.