“It needs to serve”: Butler school operator sells Cap Hill mansion for $2.8M

When Mary Starkey sold her Cap Hill mansion last week, she said “Thank you.”

“When I said goodbye to the mansion, I thanked it for its service to Starkey International. It’s been an amazing building, and I’m actually quite happy that it will continue to serve,” she said.

Starkey’s business, the Starkey International Institute for Household Management, trained butlers and maids to serve in the homes of high-class families for decades. Her approximately 12,000-square-foot mansion at 1350 Logan St. was both her residence and classroom.

Starkey closed the school in 2018, although she said she still assists in household help placements. She put the mansion up for sale in 2017.

It finally sold last week to the Boulder Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that will convert the building into a low-income housing cooperative.

And Starkey is happy for the mansion.

“It’s a big deal. It needs to serve,” she said.

63 ghosts and regretting landmark status

Starkey, a South Dakota native, came to Denver to make a life of her own. At age 32, she started with a humble house-cleaning business, and in 1994, purchased the Logan Street mansion that would house her institute for $605,000.

The business did $2 million in revenue in its best year, she said. But students weren’t the only ones who showed up, she claims.

“At one point early on, we had 63 ghosts,” she said. “Each one of them had a story. And they all were people who lived in the aristocratic areas of Capitol Hill, blue-blood people. And they ended up at my house because I ended up teaching service, which was important to them.”

The ghosts caused problems. One butler slept in his car out of fear, Starkey said. So she hired a medium who spent 10 days in the mansion and eventually told Starkey that she could tell them to leave.

“I brought in Michael the Archangel and Christ, and in a very loud and completely authoritative voice, I told them they had to leave and that Michael would show them what to do … at the count of three, there was a wisp in the air — you knew someone left — and after that they were all gone,” she said.

But Starkey’s problems at the mansion were not limited to the paranormal. Three years after buying the house, she helped make it a city landmark.

“I agreed to make it a landmark, stupidly … Since it was 30 years ago, I didn’t understand how I was hurting myself in doing so,” she said.

A friend persuaded her to do it, she said, taking her to cemeteries and recounting stories of the Cap Hill houses that had been moved to make way for modern apartment buildings. What she didn’t realize was that the designation made it much more difficult for her to make changes to the home — and more recently, to sell it.

“It screwed me out of many thousands of dollars to be a landmark. People don’t want to deal with them,” she said, referring to Denver’s Landmark Preservation Commission. “They’re not nice people. They wanted me to find wood that was of the era that the mansion was built in 1901 and have someone make windows out of that wood. Are they nuts?”

Her broker, Jeff Bernard, said landmark status did make the property challenging to sell. The site has zoning for up to eight stories, but that doesn’t matter much since the house effectively can’t be demolished.

Bernard had the listing first in 2017, when the asking price was $3.5 million — too high, he said. But Starkey replaced him for a time with a different broker, who persuaded her to raise the price.

Story via BusinessDen

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