TRADE NAMES:THE BEAUFIELD Mews, Stillorgan, like many of the good things in life, owes its beginnings to accident, luck and coincidence.

The accident was one of timing when, in the mid-1940s, Eddie (aka Valentine) Kirwan bought a derelict Beaufield House and its falling down coach-house to convert into flats. Stillorgan, at the time, was green countryside without either hotel or restaurant.

As luck would have it his wife, Gogo (aka Doreen), was a woman of energy and taste who took on the furnishing of the flats, bought too much furniture and then had to sell it.

Accident and luck became happy coincidence when Gogo Kirwan, busy selling the furniture she'd been unable to say no to in the converted coach-house, began serving tea and biscuits to customers. The Kirwans had four children: twins Jack and Jill, Hilary and Tony. Daughters Jill and Hilary were youthful helpers and thus, without plan or project, was the Beaufield Mews, a dynasty and Dublin's only antique-dealing restaurant born. The year was 1948.

The Beaufield Mews is celebrating its 60th anniversary in the third generation charge of Julie and John Hoade. Julie is a granddaughter of Gogo and Eddie Kirwan and, as she tells of her grandmother's energy and sense of fun, of her mother Jill's similar traits and her passion for antiques, it's easy to see in Julie Hoade a third generation mix of both women.

She joined the business 10 years ago but it's always been there, a seminal part of her life from the beginning. It's honed strong views too, about the ethics and culture of running a restaurant.

"My grandmother had the makings of a chef and my mother, Jill, became hooked on antiques as a girl," she says. "The nearest hotel/restaurants were in town or Dún Laoghaire so Gogo began to get requests to do weddings. She knew the owners of Jammets and so David Farrell was brought in from Jammets to help set up the Beaufield Mews. There was all the furniture for sale too, with people sitting on chairs with price tags which could literally be sold from under them!"

One of the "first and best" customers was Abbey/Hollywood actor Barry Fitzgerald. Marjorie Boland, Grafton Street boutique owner, was another early and supportive diner.

Weddings, in those days, were morning affairs because marriages had to be performed before noon. Julie produces wedding receipts and we enjoy an exercise in compare and contrast: a 1963 "fork luncheon" wedding breakfast for 38 guests cost 17/6 a head. Four bottles of Superior Liebfraumilch cost £3.12s.0d, a bottle of Amontillado cost £1.0.0 and soft drinks cost 8/-.

Seven years later in 1970 a "fork luncheon" cost 35/=per head and a bottle of Amontillado had risen to 30/=.

"Traditionally there was a sherry reception and, if you wanted a glamourous starter, then it had to be prawn cocktail," Julie says. "Main courses were usually sirloin of beef and the old dessert trolley was very popular. The restaurant end grew all the time and, by the 1970s, we'd a proper professional kitchen and the entire upstairs was a well established antique shop. Gogo had two cats she called Paisley and Bernadette who used roam all over the place."

But the times were a-changing and Gogo Kirwan getting older and, her grand-daughter says, "less able to deal with new regulations. My mother, by then married to my father Brian Cox, got involved. In the 1980s my father got involved too, and together they carried out a massive reconstruction. They had the kitchen rebuilt and more than doubled the restaurant capacity by creating two restaurants, one which can be privately hired, a proper laundry room and changing rooms for staff. The 1980s weren't a time for spending money so they were very brave, took out huge loans. They couldn't afford to close and scaffolding held up the kitchen while chefs worked around it.

"Restaurant licences at the time were for wine only, anything else was under the table! We were the first, in 1988, to get the special restaurant licence to sell spirits and beer, as well as wine."

An ornate, high-arching pergola reaching into the gardens is a graceful legacy of that "massive reconstruction". In cast-iron it was designed by architect Alfred Cochrane.

Of Jill and Brian Cox's four offspring, Julie and her older sister Susie have been the ones to most involve themselves in the business. First-born David is a director with his own business, second son Doug decided not to get involved.

"I've benefited from the money my parents poured into the place," Julie Hoade is unequivocal. "Susie ran the place with them for 10 years and was part of the restructuring; she did all of the hard slog! Then she married and went to live in Kerry and I swanned in for the Celtic Tiger and money-making times. I suppose," she's reflective but not worried, "that the proof of the pudding will be in how things go for the next 10 years."

Not a woman to equivocate, she reflects a little too on her feelings about the business and how it's affected her.

"I started off completely naive and soft, now I've the skin of a crocodile and you could throw anything at me and it would bounce off. I would say to people that if you're keen to make money don't come into this business. Also, because it's been going 60 years and isn't named after me, there's no ego involved, and nor should there be. You have to be proud of what you do but that's different. It's about the staff, some of whom have been here a very long time, and about the history of the place. You can't have one big ego shouting and roaring; everyone counts.

"Head waiter Paddy Rice is here 40 years and head chef Derval Hooper is with us over 20 years. It sounds cliched but we're very much a team, it's not about just one person."

Which brings us neatly enough to husband, John Hoade, and how he became part of the Beaufield Mews.

"He's a big wine person and opened his own shop in Lucan for a while. But we found that running two businesses, first with two children and then three, was too much. We thought about building a wine shop here but found the cost would have been astronomical. So John came into the business and has been working alongside me for two years now. He does all the wines and is a very, very good front of house person. He chats to everyone!"

Contrasting a latter-day Beaufield Mews wedding with an early day's one, Julie says the difference is that "there was no choice then, there's every choice now. The trend, if you're very sophisticated and very posh, is for a low carbon footprint wedding. The wine has to be European, not Chilean or Australian, and we buy local as much as possible, even to the flowers for the table. We're trying to be better ourselves on the carbon footprint. Why, here in Ireland for instance, are we buying water in from France when we've our own great water?"

She's glad to work the business as a family, but is eminently pragmatic. "I'm not going to carry the mantle to the grave if it becomes too much. I would never push our children into the business. I'd like to see them be completely independent and, if they did join, for it to be an independently-made choice.That said, we'd the best week of trading ever last week. The Celtic Tiger is still loudly roaring here."