If we have done our job properly, you will never see most of it.
You will open the door and find the house ready.
The bed will be made. The towels will be fresh. Everything will be where it should be. The terrace will be clean, the plants watered, and breakfast will arrive in the morning as though this were simply the natural order of things.
Which, of course, it is not.
There is a whole invisible world behind a house that appears to require no attention at all.
Someone has already noticed that a light bulb was beginning to flicker.
Someone discovered that the coffee machine had chosen this particular morning to develop a personality.
Someone carried the clean linen up the steps.
Someone watered the plants before the Santorini sun had a chance to finish them off.
Someone noticed the mark on the glass that nobody else would probably have noticed.
And breakfast certainly did not appear on the terrace by divine intervention.
There were groceries to buy, things to prepare, trays to arrange, coffee capsules to order and a small daily calculation involving who wants what, at what time, and where.
Then there are the things that happen while guests are away.
A towel is replaced.
A terrace is swept again because the wind has returned everything we swept away in the morning.
Something breaks.
Something else looks as though it is considering breaking, so we deal with it before it reaches a decision.
And some things develop recurring habits.
There is, for example, a particular door handle that has never fully accepted the concept of permanent employment. Every so often, despite repeated attempts to persuade it otherwise, it abandons its post and remains cheerfully in someone’s hand.
There is the courier who has an extraordinary instinct for arriving approximately three minutes after the last member of staff has left for the day.
And there was the day the cistern ran out of water.
Not because nobody had thought to check it. We had a warning light for precisely that purpose.
The warning light had stopped working. It had neglected to warn us.
There is a certain elegance to a system designed to tell you that you have a problem becoming, itself, the reason you have a problem.
A pot sheds another small piece of itself, apparently determined to return gradually to the earth from which it came.
And somewhere, inevitably, there is a bougainvillea refusing to bloom when required.
Most of this isn’t particularly dramatic. That is the point.
Hospitality, at least as I understand it, is made up of hundreds of small things that should never become the guest’s problem.
Most of them are ordinary. Some are tedious. A few are ridiculous.
And occasionally one requires three telephone calls, two people, a screwdriver and language I would prefer not to reproduce here.
But if everything goes well, by the time you return to the house, the problem has disappeared.
You may never even know there was one.
I like it that way.
I don’t think a guest should have to admire the effort behind a comfortable stay. The purpose of all that effort is precisely the opposite.
You should be able to sit down, have your coffee, look at the view.
And assume that everything simply works.
Just don’t be too surprised if, somewhere behind the scenes, someone is running up the stairs carrying towels while arguing with a plumber on the phone.
Some things are better left unseen.