Window Washer Gets a Clear View of the Pampered Life

There are windows of opportunity and windows to the soul, and then there are the windows that Philip Bregstone washes.

About this time every spring, as he has done since 1993, Bregstone packs his family into a white Subaru hatchback, leaves his chicken and goat farm in Colorado and travels across the country to wash the windows of the Washington elite.

Bregstone, 39, known about town as “Dr. Glass,” after his window-cleaning business of the same name, is a squeegee to the stars.

His clients include New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing, former Rep. Jack Kemp, former boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard and Knight Kiplinger, editor-in-chief of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine.

Bregstone spends every spring and part of the summer in his clients’ glass houses, washing the dust, the chimney soot and the bugs from their French panes, Palladian tops, clerestories, single casements and double-hungs. He spends the rest of the year working on his farm near Boulder with his wife, Roberta, and their two sons, Jonah, 4, and Julian, 1.

What he sees can tell him a lot about houses.

Bregstone likes to say that his business grew up with the Washington housing market. He started out in the 1970s, he said, when windows tended to be smaller and there were fewer of them in the Colonial models favored by his customers. The windows he washes these days, he said, are larger and harder to reach.

“A monster house in the ‘70s is a modest home today,” Bregstone said. And because monster houses are the bulk of his business, he has moved on with the market and up with his clients who are buying them.

A monster house is a house of windows that stretch from floor to ceiling, a house with skylights, chandeliers, glass-front fireplaces and bathtubs surrounded by glass. Houses with large two-story windows or bay windows that look out into the woods and onto the rivers. Houses with people who do not have time to wash windows. Houses whose occupants can afford to pay to have them washed.

Bregstone, whose business grossed $250,000 last year, charges by the window, as do most window washers in the area. Bregstone’s window prices range from $4 to $20, which also is similar to what other companies charge. He said that cleaning the average house costs a homeowner $300 to $600. His least expensive job is $125, which is the minimum he charges. The most expensive is $2,000.

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Bregstone, who has the haircut of a Bon Jovi rocker who grew up, got married and had children but couldn’t part with the hair tail, was at the home of Knight and Ann Kiplinger recently to wash windows. It’s an annual spring job he has had since he and the Kiplingers were brought together several years ago by a leaflet that blew into their yard.

He was there at 8:30 a.m. on Monday with no time to waste. This is peak window-washing time in the Washington area. The weather is nicer, sure, but more important, said Nancy Pannell, office manager for the Silver Spring, Md.-based window-washing outfit Crystal Clear Reflections Inc., “there is more daylight so you notice the windows are dirty.”

Back at the Kiplinger house, the rain was coming down in buckets, so Bregstone worked inside the house, where he maneuvered around the furniture and the piano to get at the Palladian windows, so named for the 16th century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, whose style was based on the revival of Roman forms.

T As he worked, Bregstone talked with Kiplinger about financial forecasts.

With his clients, Bregstone trades “parenting advice, cookie recipes and tales of woe about the challenges of two different households--for them, Potomac and the Cape; for us, Boulder and D.C.,” he said.

Kiplinger called Bregstone a “New Age migrant worker.”

“It’s a wonderful way to amalgamate the wages of Washington with the lifestyle of Colorado,” he said.

Bregstone has made windows his business since age 17, when he bought his first squeegee to earn money to pay for college. It was a job that fit his musician’s lifestyle. He could work during the day and play piano and guitar in downtown bars at night.

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One of his first clients was then Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum. It was Metzenbaum who introduced Bregstone to what he called the Washington “celebrity circle.”

In the years since, Bregstone discovered that the window business seemed to be in his blood--make that his bucket. Make that his favorite double-sided bucket loaded with various sizes of squeegees on one side and a mild soapy solution on the other.

“What we do is very, very different from the painter or the gardener,” he said. “We go into the bathroom. We go all over the house. We spend a day living with the families.”

With 1,200 clients who expect to see their reflection by August, Bregstone has help with his Washington business. His team of workers includes a music teacher, a preacher, a political scientist and a U.S. Navy satellite imagery specialist.

“It’s the details that make the difference,” Bregstone said. “We wear slippers in the house. We take a Polaroid of the trickier rooms to be sure we get everything back in place.”

Even in Washington, or maybe especially in Washington, Bregstone cannot imagine the life that some of his clients have. He is content, Bregstone said, with being “an overachieving tradesman in a niche business.”

What is the worst life he can imagine?

“Having to get dressed up every morning and sitting in a conference room with no windows,” he said.