27 Oct 2025 Maid Brigade Westchester Stresses Healthy Environment to Work

It would be hard to find anyone more excited about cleaning houses than Gary and Robin Murphy.

They are the husband-and-wife duo behind the Westchester franchise of Maid Brigade, which they initially established in 1996 in Chappaqua, where they lived for years. Despite moves to Pleasantville, Valhalla, back to Chappaqua and now headquartered in a space on North Broadway in North White Plains, they have turned the cleaning business into part art and part science.

Maid Brigade was recently named one of 914Inc. Magazine’s 2024 Best Places to Work. For the Murphy’s, they are as proud of their commitment to personal and professional development, satisfaction and empowerment for their roughly 25-member staff as they are of their work. It is one of the reasons why there is a waiting list for people who want to work for them.

“People think of an unskilled manual laborer doing a lowly job, and I realize our staff is very skilled, our staff has to have safety skills, technical skills, problem-solving skills, time management,” Robin Murphy said.

Each team of two or three cleaners are dispatched each weekday morning by about 7:30 a.m. to clean from one to as many as seven houses in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam or southern Fairfield County. The work day is seven to eight hours long. Robin said they are “super-efficient” but their workers don’t needlessly rush through a house.

“We’re spending however much time it takes to get the job done, if houses are close together,” she said.

Their crews are sent out in vans outfitted with the best equipment including the Murphys own electrolyzed water, a combination of salt and water that is mixed in a special machine where they can adjust the pH levels to make a potent but safe disinfectant, unlike a variety of commercial brands.

Placed in the company’s own spray bottles it has a shelf life of six months and can effectively clean nearly any kind of surface, Gary Murphy said.

“When Robin talks about professionalizing the industry, we all take it seriously,” he said. “That means staff are cleaning with these safe products. This is just salt and water. That’s it.”