POOCH NANNIES
Dog owners gone mad
Over the past two years, Antonet Verschuren has shared her bedroom with a variety of canine companions. But a short stint in a luxury Kensington apartment recently put her firmly in her place.
Employed by a wealthy Japanese couple to be the live-in nanny for their two miniature poodles, she discovered she had to make do with a mattress on the floor to sleep on. The dogs, meanwhile, cuddled up together on a vast sofa bed that dwarfed their sleeping frames.
“When I asked the owners about it, they said that was what people did in Japan, but I noticed they had their own massive bed,” she says. “They were very rich, but money doesn’t always buy a certain type of hospitality.”
That may be, but it does buy you a dog nanny — the new “must-have” for the super-rich. We’re not talking casual staff employed to take the little darlings for brisk strolls through Kensington Palace Gardens, but people such as Verschuren, who are recruited to actually live with the dog 24 hours a day, feeding, washing, grooming and even sharing a room.
The wealthy have always been enamoured with what P.G. Wodehouse called their “dumb chums,” but with Britain now the super-rich capital of the world — home to 104 billionaires — full-time nannies to care for their extended canine menageries have become essential members of the hired help. The role is something akin to that of a governess, except one entrusted with the care of a slobbering pug in a pink diamond-studded collar.
Verschuren, a former City worker who set up her business, West London Petsitter, in 2013, operates at the top end of the market, charging around $180 a day for live-in care. Often she and her “team” will take the pets out on day trips to bucolic locations such as Hampton Court Palace and the neo-Palladian villa Chiswick House and snap photographs, which she then sends to the owners.
“What we offer is bespoke,” she says. “It really depends on what the customer wants. For most people, their pets are like their own children.”
Usually dog nannies are recruited by the same families for weeks or months, on several occasions over the course of a year. A few, however, are paid to be the pet’s constant companion for years at a time.
“We have quite a lot of clients who go overseas at short notice,” says dog nanny Nina Coles, the founder of Nina’s Nannies for Pets, which delivers sitters to homes all over southern Britain. Like many in the business, she insists that client confidentiality is paramount, but admits her team works for various “high-profile people in show business and the gentry” from Europe to Saudi Arabia and China.
“They have gardeners and chefs as well but some people just want to have somebody with experience of looking after animals on their property,” she says. “Some (dog nannies) will be given their own annex, or a cottage in the garden, but mostly it is just a room in the client’s property.”
Dog nanny Susannah Wheeler, once of Belgravia, now of Gloucestershire, operates a different policy. The 53-year-old moves her clients’ pets into her own cottage for care 24 hours a day — currently she has eight dogs fighting for space on her bed every night. Mercifully, she only accepts breeds that weigh less than 10 kilograms.
Wheeler, a former television executive, started her business seven years ago with a dog daycare near Hyde Park, and counted Russian oligarchs and members of the Royal family among her clients. Since moving to the countryside, many of her London dog owners have stayed on her books and she regularly travels down for handovers at Paddington railway station.
“I’ve had dogs for up to three months at a time,” she says.
“One of my clients is an incredibly wealthy person who owns most of the Middle East but he has a Pomeranian who can’t stand the temperature.”
The obvious terror, for any nanny entrusted with looking after such cosseted pets, is what happens if something goes wrong? A pampered Maltese enjoying a country walk must make an attractive target for other less well-bred beasts.
Wheeler, however, doesn’t mind an emergency. A few months ago she noticed that a chihuahua in her care had trouble turning its head. Numerous panicked phone calls and an emergency MRI scan led to a diagnosis of bacterial meningitis.
The dog made a remarkable recovery.
“That is what people are paying me for,” she says.