It may be the classiest school on the planet— a 13,000-square-foot, 108-year-old Victorian mansion nestled in the shadows of Denver’s skyline, a kind of ultra-elegant laboratory for its students: future butlers (the more modern term is “household managers”).

Graduates will be lighting cigars (hold the flame an eighth of an inch from the end to ensure an even start) and polishing Rolls-Royces (be gentle and don’t leave swirls) for their employers—that richest 1 percent you hear about in election years.

Harvard’s got nothing on this place. It’s called Starkey International Institute for Household Management, and its headmistress and founder, Mary Louise Starkey, is just as chic as this school she started back in 1990. (And she prefers to be called Mrs. Starkey, not Mary.)

“This is all about growing service into a

true profession,” she explains, sitting on a traditional English-style formal sofa in the mansion’s

front room, just steps outside her office.

Mrs. Starkey is made for the job. She grew up in South Dakota with wealth. “My father had old-guard service staff. It was beautiful to see and to have in our lives,” she says. One of her most poignant memories is, at age 7, watching her father’s driver, Walter, polish a family automobile. “He did it with

such great love,” she recalls. “I can see it in my mind now.”

Service with a smile: Future butlers practice the protocol of formal dining.

Mrs. Starkey could have lounged in a life of leisure. Not a chance. “I walked away from a lot of money,” she states, “but I wanted to return to my roots on my own terms.”

After college she landed a job with Goodwill Industries in Denver, finding jobs for the developmentally disabled.  But one day a friend asked her to help fix up her house, and the idea of starting her own housecleaning and cooking business hit.  “I put an ad in The Denver Post,” she says. “In three months I had 100 clients.” That was in 1981.

As business grew, Mrs. Starkey became more interested in training her employees in the proper ways to serve clients, so she converted her business to a school.  Some of these clients hired her first graduates. She also tapped advertising and publicity to find new clients. So far she’s sent 1,200 students

to the world’s most extravagant estates.

Mrs. Mary Louise Starkey

She says she’s particularly proud of turning their salaries around from $30 a week to $70,000 to $200,000 a year.

Yes, you read that correctly. The average starting salary runs $60,000 to $80,000. But students have to invest about $16,000 for the eight weeks of training.

The classroom in the mansion’s lower level (not far from the wine cellar) looks surprisingly like, well, a classroom: three rows of tables with laptop computers (Mrs. Starkey has patented her own software that identifies, organizes and prioritizes service expectations), and up front a white board next to a TV and DVD player. The walls are covered

with scraps of large easel-board papers; one has a layout of a large home that’s separated into “cleaning zones.” Think home economics on steroids.

Classes cover food preparation, housekeeping,

cleaning, property maintenance, transportation arranging, safety and property protection, event coordination, vendor management, service standards, clothing and personal care skills, wine, human resources communications and more.

Clearly the real learning happens in other parts of the mansion, especially the kitchen and dining room, where the students learn the details of running a formal dining table: “It’s an old art form intrinsic to the family and family entertaining,” Mrs.

Starkey says. “It’s about etiquette, manners and graciousness”—three words that sum up Starkey International.

Mrs. Starkey pauses and ponders a question: Has the world lost the meaning of service? “Yes. Wherever we go, we educate about service. Service is meeting a specific expectation, and it requires both a giver and a receiver for service to actually take place.”

An elegant toast to both.