TradeNames:Oakline, run by four Dublin brothers, has had its hard times but is now doing well and expects to double turnover by 2009, writes Rose Doyle

Four brothers run Oakline, the furniture-making company whose Libris line of fitted kitchens, bedrooms and all you might need for an office in the home, has made them the furniture makers of choice of a fair number of the country's millionaires and huge numbers of the rest of the population.

Such status in the furniture world didn't come overnight. Oakline grew from the acorn that was Charlie Roche working in a small, rented cottage in Ranelagh in 1958. The company still has a stronghold in Ranelagh, where TradeNames heard its story.

The brothers are Charlie Roche's sons - Bill, David, Cathal and Gearoid - all Dubs from way back with all belonging to them woodworkers from way back too.

Bill Roche tells their story with much enjoyment, the digressions of a real storyteller and the worries of the first-born that he may not be doing his siblings justice. That's families for you.

Charlie Roche, 87 this year, was one of a family of six boys and one girl. His parents, William and Charlotte, reared their family on Brown Street, Dublin 8, in a house owned by Phelans, the furniture makers where William was a foreman. Charlie Roche and his brothers William, James, Austin and Joe were, Bill says, "hugely skilled woodworkers, all at the finer end of the business, each with his own, individual business. If they'd pulled together instead of doing their own thing they could have run the Dublin furniture scene". Charlie became a wood-machinist and cabinet-maker and married Ellen Gormley from Menlough, outside Galway. William (Bill), David, Cathal and Gearoid are their sons. Charlie Roche worked for Sisk at Rianna, Limerick but, by 1958 when Bill was 11 and the family were living on Chelmsford Road, Ranelagh, he'd decided it was time to work for himself.

"He rented a little cottage at Westmoreland Park, to the back of Chelmsford Road, and started to work away, making to commission," Bill says. "He did a lot of work for the Jewish community. My confirmation jacket was made by Sam Sabin in Cope Street; Dad was making a wardrobe for him at the time. He worked like that for two years, mostly making wardrobes and kitchens and old-style dressers with 14 coats of paint on them to bring up the gloss! Then one day he got sick . . ."

Charlie Roche recovered from the rheumatoid arthritis which struck him down, but not before spending six non-working months attending Baggot Street Hospital.

Ellen Roche had taken in lodgers during his illness but "there were debts to be paid so he had to get a job. He worked firstly for Clifton and Cooper, making church furniture, then for the builder Jimmy McElvenny. But he always did nixers and wanted to work for himself. I remember the day he came in and Mom said 'I've got a place for you'."

Charlie got back to the business of being Charles Roche & Sons in the two-storey mews Ellen found on Dartmouth Square, Ranelagh. Fortune smiled when the Dominician Universal Woodworking Machine came their way.

"The bank refused Dad a loan for a woodworking machine but Paddy Woods, a Sisk's director and friend of Dad's, had a Dominician buried, literally, in the back garden of his house on Waterloo Road and told Dad he could have it. We dug it out, David, myself, Dad, a friend of Dad's called Spud Murphy and somehow got it to Dartmouth Square where David and I spent all of what was a lovely, fine summer stripping it down, sitting at the open door of the loft. It was a fantastic machine with boring capabilities as well as being a saw bench, thicknesser, surface planer, spindle moulder and overhead ranter and allowed us do a lot of serious joinery work.

"We worked for Durkin Bros, made a new door for Laurence O'Toole Church and a modern, minimalist altar of Burmese teak for the Poor Clare Convent in Donnybrook which was commissioned by De Valera."

By the mid-1960s the company had moved to the rear of 6, Ranelagh, into what had been the cowsheds of Bridget McDonnell's Dairy. Bill, from a rear window, points out new buildings on the spot they then occupied.

School days over, none too soon he says, Bill spent a mid-1960s summer in swinging London before "starting without a clue" in the family business, "doing the books and things like that. Mom, in all this time, supported Dad, put up with him working all hours, things people wouldn't put up with now! She really was a hero, the one who insisted education was important. All my brothers went to Marian College."

Ellen Roche died some 20 years ago, RIP.

Bill Roche spent more than a decade garnering experience and knowledge outside the company. He studied accountancy at night in Rathmines College of Commerce, worked for Brown and Poulson, moved to Becton Dickinson as a cost accountant, then to Unidare in Finglas where he finished his exams and became a member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.

His next employer, Pellet Mill in Wexford, sent him for "a fantastic three months' training in San Francisco". Always a Dub, he was working for Bell and Howell in Clonskeagh and had been some 12 years out of the family company when, 25 years ago in 1982, he returned to the fold.

"I came back as 'a brother'. I suppose the notion was that the business could do with an accountant," he is smiling, laconic, "and that I could bring accounting and marketing skills to the business."

David Roche, after a period working for Noyeks, had come into the company when Bill left and, in the late 1970s, the company purchased the shop which is today's Ranelagh showrooms and office. Cathal and Gearoid had joined the business by then too and, on foot of a contract with Durkin Bros, the company began to concentrate on fitted kitchens.

But the 1980s were "disasterville in Ireland so we decided to open a business in England".

An arrangement which had Gearoid running things in Hornchurch, east London and Bill commuting ended when former chancellor Nigel Lawson put a stop to double tax relief.

"The shutters came down overnight and we lost a fortune. Gearoid came home. We were wrecked, all of us. Dad had retired in 1986. He'd always insisted it was better for a family to pull together and that underpinned our philosophy in the business so we hung in, started investing money in marketing. We got onto a CTT programme, spent a fortune designing a nice range and were on the Late Late Show. But we were a bit ahead of the times."

Then they developed the Libris range of bookcases and home office furniture and the company's future arrived. They moved from a Thomas Street manufacturing premises to a modern factory in the Greenhills Business Park, Dublin 24.

"We started looking outside ourselves, importing the German Nolte and Italian Berloni range. We changed the name to Oakline. Vincent Hogan, who apprenticed with Dad at 14, is the longest here but guys tend to work a long time for the place. Gearoid, Cathal and Bert Lamont are our design consultants and discuss design and lifestyle at length with customers. David is operations director and looks after manufacturing. Our computerisation is largely down to him. We're opening new showrooms on Fonthill Road and that'll be Cathal's baby. He's the project champion. Gearoid will be here, in Ranelagh."

Bill is company MD, but only since the brothers were advised, during a FÁS "step-up programme", that someone had to take responsibility. "No one else wanted it so I was left. We're going through change, hoping for a release of creative energy. We employ over 20 people full time and expect to double our turnover by 2009."

Continuity is not a worry. David's daughter, Clayre, is already on board and his son, Niall, an apprentice in the business, continues the woodworking tradition. Bill's eldest, Sean, works on a contract basis with the company and another, younger Roche off-spring, may yet come on board.

"The sky's our limit," Bill Roche says.