Redux: The Butler
Sally Olds cleans up at a sex BnB
Over the summer, we’ll be re-upping three previously pay-walled classic TPE columns for you to enjoy. This week, Sally Olds ventures to the unusually tasteful, fully-equipped BDSM guest house, where she shadows a seasoned butler performing their main duty: the morning-after clean-up. Originally published July 31, 2025.
The house seems orderly when I first enter. A large, 1920s bungalow in a northern suburb of Melbourne, it has the high ceilings and generous proportions of its era. Off the hallway to the right as you enter is the master bedroom. If you continue straight down the hall, you will find a renovated bathroom, a kitchen with its original cabinetry, and a laundry room. At the back of the house is a sleep-out that has been converted into a small second bedroom. Each room has been furnished with suitably vintage twentieth-century items: a teak extendable table and leather-seated chairs; an old-fashioned timber wardrobe; a teak sideboard. It resembles, at first sight, a particularly well-kempt sharehouse (35+, part-time arts admin, keen gardener). There is a healthy Monstera in a pot. The bed is neatly made and the surfaces clear of tchotchkes or discarded objects. But then Xan appears and warns me to watch my step.
“Somebody covered in oil has walked through the house barefoot,” they say.
If, instead of turning right at the front door, you begin your tour by passing through the grey-blue door on the lefthand side of the hallway, the house gives up its secrets immediately. Behind this door is a large room known as the “play space.” Closest to the window is a black metal frame, from which hangs a leather sling attached by a complicated arrangement of thick silver chains (“They’ve really gotten creative with the chains,” observes Xan). There is what looks like an oversized step-ladder in the front left corner of the room: a padded bottom step and top step, with the leather upholstery pinned to the frame with rows of shiny silver studs. In the center of the room, there is a wheeled piece of furniture similar to a masseuse’s table, only its frame is formed by black metal bars enclosing a space beneath it: a lockable cage. There is a row of pale brown leather cuffs hanging in order of length from one wall. On another wall a mesh frame holds a vast array of canes, whips, silicone paddles, blindfolds, carabiners, and ropes. The rather grandmotherly display cabinet in the adjoining lounge room turns out to contain several spiky stainless steel instruments. There is a stack of magazines on the sidetable: Wicked Women, Slit, Dirty Queer. The house is called Hedon House, and it can be booked by the night or by the hour. What you are paying for is not just an unusually tasteful BnB but an unusually tasteful, fully-equipped BDSM guest house.
Xan is wearing a beanie, a black long-sleeved T-shirt, and some silver chains around their neck. They assure me I’ve come on a good day. Despite Hedon House’s initially tidy appearance, there is plenty to do. Their shift is from 10am to 12pm, and there is another booking tonight. They can quickly tell what’s amiss in the house because they were the one to clean and reset it before last night’s booking, and the booking before that, and dozens of times during the last two years in which they have worked in the house as a “butler.” At the most basic level, this is a cleaning role; Xan cleans up after other people’s sex. The business was recently seeking a new employee to work in Melbourne (there is also a Hedon House, the original, in Sydney), and the position description gives a good sense of the job. “Does your penchant for tidiness cause friction in your domestic relationships, because no one’s standards are as high as yours?” it reads. “Do you get a deep sense of satisfaction from checking every box on the list?”
Next to the ad, there is a photograph of Niles from The Nanny, an archetypal plummy, perpetually suited, witheringly judgemental, unctuous manservant. The role of a butler is traditionally one of both power and subservience. One might say butlers top from the bottom. In books and films, a butler acts like a sieve that filters inputs—passing on telephone messages and letters, receiving guests—and blocks unwanted ones. They typically know everything that goes on in a household. When Lady Mary spent the night with the dashing Mr Pamuk in her bedroom at Downton Abbey, a passionate evening that ended with him expiring from a heart attack, the butler, Mr Carson, knew, despite the lengths the ladies of the house went to conceal it. A butler’s power derives from his knowledge of his charges’ secrets and their helplessness in matters of dress, upkeep, cooking, and cleaning. A butler’s subservience is guaranteed by rigid class hierarchies and a life spent in intimacy with people whose affection is conditional on performance.
Butlerhood at Hedon House is a different affair. Any proximity to traditional buttling is a consciously-produced, horny pastiche wielded by the individual butler. “Have a fantasy of a trannyfag maid polishing your glassware? Get in touch!” reads one of the butler’s bios—but this is strictly by special arrangement only. A guest cannot rock up and demand a butler cook their eggs while wearing cut-out tuxedo chaps. Butlers report not to guests but to the owner, or Mother, of the House, Gala Vanting, who lives in Sydney. She is closely involved with the day-to-day operations of the Sydney House, and manages Melbourne and its guests from afar. Butlers at Hedon are not on site during a guest’s stay, though they are sometimes on call when Gala needs a break, fielding text messages about how to turn on the heating or use the bidet. The butlers still get front-row seats to the household’s sex lives, though. According to the position description, there are “...daily opportunities to try to piece together WTF happened last night, based only on the end result. Cheap thrills on tap!”
Xan was hired because in their previous job as a software engineer, they were in charge of quality assurance. They aim for “quality as a process,” an outcome that results from a well-ordered but flexible system. Today, I’m less interested in the cheap thrills than in how the aftermath of sex gets eradicated before the next guests arrive—or maybe that is a cheap thrill; maybe that’s a kink. In an ordinary hotel, one might try to conceal signs of X-rated behaviour. At Hedon House, where guests are asked to place used equipment in antique-look ice buckets labelled “USED,” concealment is a no-no. And this is not just missionary lovemaking between a husband and wife, the condom’s contents secured by an overhand knot and tossed into the bedroom rubbish bin. What happens at Hedon is techy, complicated, operatic, sometimes multi-player sex. The sophistication of the cleanup has to scale up in kind.
Such is the proficiency of Xan’s system that it is only mildly disrupted by my shadowing presence. Usually, their first step would be to strip the bed and put the sheets in the washing machine so that they can get them dry before the shift ends. On the way to the laundry, they would do a loop of the house to assess the general level of filth (shining a torch around to pick up any hidden grime), noting what will require the most time to reset to its original condition. Then they would return to the bedroom to begin cleaning properly.
But in the bedroom, it appears that the bed hasn’t been slept in or used. The towels are still elaborately rolled and folded, exactly where Xan left them, at a jaunty angle at the foot of the bed. Theoretically, the previous guests could have replaced them just so. Xan flicks back the doona to inspect the corners of the sheets, which are still tightly tucked in: “Guests never bother to do that when they re-make the bed.” It was an overnight stay, so this means the guests didn’t sleep, at least not in the bed.
Xan leaves the room as is, for now. They walk through to the play space, collect a glossy black dropsheet from the bondage bed, and perform further reconnaissance on the way to the laundry. In the kitchen, they briefly examine the interior of an open drawer. “They’ve taken the bins out,” Xan observes. Taking the bins out is not part of guest protocol. If guests do remove the rubbish, it can sometimes mean they have tossed something that, for whatever reason, they don’t want others to see: the remnants of drug use, a used sex toy. What was inside the bin is less important than what this action tells Xan—that the guests may be stashers of items, complicators of carefully wrought procedures.
Recon completed, Xan decides on priorities. Today, the floors and play space demand the most attention. But first, there is a backlog of washing and drying to do. While Xan unspools damp towels from the laundry basket, I gaze at an artwork on one of the walls: a drawing of a giant foot strapped into a Pleaser heel, stepping on and crushing a police car. There are a couple of other BDSM-forward BnBs in Victoria that I know of, and several more sex-on-premises venues in Melbourne, all of which range from the intriguing to the tacky to the alarming, but none of them look quite like Hedon House. At the Stamford Plaza, to give an example of what Hedon House is not, you can purchase a “Romance and Seduction Package” (meaning they dim the lights, run you a bath, and chill some champagne), with “Black Label Enhancements” available, including the “Pure Love Lounge,” a curvy couch that apparently enables greater sexual creativity. Hedon House comes from a different lineage than fluffy handcuffs and whipped cream. In the kitchen, the logo on the Soda Stream has been covered up by a tiny sticker that reads: “from the river to the sea.” Many of the leather restraints and other pieces of equipment are handmade locally. Among the porn mags in the lounge room, there are copies of Overland, the 2018 all-First Nations edition of The Lifted Brow, Blak Brow, a copy of Luke Carman’s essay collection Intimate Antipathies, an anthology by members of the Sex Work Narrative Salon called I Want It I Need It I Make It, and a historical photo book about La Mama Theatre.
The first Hedon House, in Sydney, was originally Gala’s own home, purpose-built for living and working in—Gala is a sex worker, and at the time, was also at a sex worker rights organisation. “It’s essentially just a 4D model of my desires and aesthetic,” she told me over email. But quickly, Gala realised that “she and I had something.” (“She” being the house; Hedon’s pronouns are she/her.) Friends came to stay and had transformative experiences. Gala began renting out her home for a small fee to trusted peers, before she eventually opened it to the public. The “little sister” house, in Melbourne, arrived in 2023.
Xan and I return to the play space, walking gingerly across the oily floorboards. There is a large white chest of drawers against one wall, the kind with small square drawers and slots for labels on the front, once used for filing library cards. I open each drawer and poke around. In one, there are four tight rows of rainbow-packeted condoms, neatly ordered by colour. “I find arranging them quite satisfying,” Xan says. In another, there’s a box of black surgical gloves. We both slip on a pair. Lubricants. Disinfectant. A dozen or so dildos. On top of the chest is a tube of anal relaxer gel, which the guests have brought themselves and left behind.
On the floor next to the chest of drawers is a fucking machine. It stands on four legs, about shin high, resembling an obscene pet. Attached to a cable is a small box with a single dial, like something a cartoon villain would use to control a laser beam. When Xan turns the dial, a naked protruding rod starts withdrawing and extruding. They turn the dial a little more. It chugs along faster. Next to it is a small white bucket of dildo attachments. Xan begins swabbing the frame of the machine with Clinell disinfectant wipes.
In another of the “USED” tubs is a tangle of equipment. I catalogue the items one by one, laying each on the bed afterwards. There is a leather paddle and a silicone paddle. There are nine sets of leather cuffs of varying sizes, some with silvery traces of fluid on them. There is a braided leather whip. There is a leather riding crop. There are two small, silver, doubled-ended hooks for general use, such as linking chains or cuffs together. Finally, there is a mean-looking leather flogger with dozens of finger-width tassels and a thick timber handle. Underneath the stool in the corner, Xan fishes out a used condom and a torn condom wrapper. I replace the equipment in the bucket and Xan spirits this, and the used dildos, into the laundry to begin the cleaning process. I observe three key steps:
Place the bucket into the sink. Fill it with warm water and Morning Fresh detergent. Remove and discard a broken condom from the largest dildo. Wash and rinse all items. Do not cut corners: “You have to be mindful of how things can be used. For instance, the handle of this paddle could be inserted.”
Remove items from the bath one by one, spraying each thoroughly with Viraclean, a pink, hospital-grade disinfectant that kills basically anything it touches.
Place items in the dish-rack on top of the dryer. Leave for at least ten minutes to allow the disinfectant to do its work. Put the next load of dirty laundry on, and put the clean laundry into the dryer. Suppress a giggle as the dildos waggle in concert with the machine.
Xan moves onto the kitchen. On the table, there is a small, tightly rolled strip of cardboard, a roach for a joint. They sweep some golden crumbs off the table, then pull out the chairs and wipe down the seats. The other day, they tell me, there was a cock print on one of the chairs. The kitchen today is largely untouched. In the fridge, the guests have left behind three bottles of soft drink: a half-drunk bottle of Mountain Dew Berry Spark Energised Soft Drink, whose acid pink liquid is the exact same shade as the Viraclean; an unopened bottle of 0 Sugar Kirks Lemonade; and an unopened bottle of Sugar Free Pasito.
While Xan continues into the lounge room, I try to solve last night’s mystery. Was it Colonel Mustard and Mrs Peacock in the play space with the riding crop? Or maybe Colonel Mustard and Mrs Peacock and Miss Scarlett and Mayor Green? Actually, Xan said it was just two people. Whodunnit? Both of them. What did they do? They arrived at the house. They did not use the kitchen to cook. They smoked a joint and got UberEats and drank Mountain Dew. At least one of them was dramatically lubed up. They padded around with bare, oily feet. They favoured leather and silicone and body restraints—there is a whole section of cane rods and staffs, as well as the cabinet of painful-looking stainless steel implements, all untouched. Somebody was bent over the stool. They wheeled the bondage bed into the middle of the room. At least one person had at least one orgasm; one hopes they both did. They kicked on. They took the bins out. Although last night’s guests haven’t written in the Guest Book, the repertoire of imagined activities can be broadened by reading previous entries.
“SPICE GIRLS THEMED ORGY,” reads one.
“Still readjusting my jaw after awhile in a mouth spreader, culminating in coffee being poured down my throat,” reads another.
The bathroom gets a quick but thorough scrub. Xan pays particular attention to the nozzle of the bidet attachment. “I don’t trust people not to stick it up their butt,” they say (though there is a strongly-worded sign prohibiting this next to the toilet). Next, they will do the floors with a steam mop, twice over. They will squat down and examine the play space floor from a distance of several metres to see if any areas repel or catch the light in an unusual way. Then, Xan will remove their gloves, wash their hands, and run them bare over all the usually-overlooked surfaces—remote controls, door knobs, the air conditioning panel—feeling for sticky patches. They will check obscure nooks for any concealed trash. They will refill the “Welcum Basket” with three towels, a Splash Blanket, a waterproof drop sheet, a medical kit, and some absorbent, disposable pads. Finally, they will replace the hand towels, tea towels, bath towels, bath robes, face washers, and toilet rolls.
By now, it’s after midday, and Xan is almost done. It’s pleasant in the sunny house. I don’t feel squeamish. Here, in the scene of someone else’s morning-after, I feel matter-of-fact, as though, in two short hours, I’ve managed to access a nurse’s pragmatic cheer about human spillage and waste. But this isn’t a hospital or a clinic (unless that’s what you want it to be, temporarily). It’s more like a dégustation, or a ride in a limousine, or any other luxurious experience that operates within the paradox of service work—namely, that prosaic labour is what sustains the fantasy for the paying customer. Somebody books guests into the house, and another person cleans up after them, and if the system functions as it should, the guests can choose to ignore the communal nature of their private acts. By the time the butler pulls the front door shut behind them, it will be like nobody was ever there.