TradeNames: After a shaky start, Pianos Plus has found its feet and is playing a steady, successful tune for its founders, writes Rose Doyle.

There's no stopping John Holland once he gets talking - no matter the subject. It can be about traffic or holidays or the state of the nation but, most eloquently, he enthrals about pianos, about the Holland generations before him who've tuned "the king of instruments", about the company which grew out of it all and which today supplies piano players from rock heads to classical competitors.

"Most people want to eventually own their own business," he says. "Myself and Henry (Gillanders, his partner in business) made the decision to leave secure jobs and go out on our own in May 1990."

That was when they set up Pianos Plus, selling pianos, hiring them for concerts, tuning, moving and repairing them. The secure jobs they left were with McCullough Piggott, one of the country's oldest piano and musical instrument companies.

But far earlier roots were with Alexander Holland, great-grandfather of John, who was a Piggott's piano tuner before McCullough came along. John Holland, with a fine appreciation for detail, tells the tale.

"Piano tuning has always passed down in families. Alexander's son, my grandfather George Johnston-Holland, went to work in Piggotts too and was sent to Limerick to take charge of their Limerick shop, tuning the pianos and all that. The old Piggotts had shops in Sligo, Limerick, Cork and Dublin. He was Protestant but played as an organist in a Catholic church where he met and became such buddies with a Catholic priest that he converted and became a devout Catholic. He married a Limerick girl called Anne O'Malley, her people were stonemasons, and they had two sons. One of them was my Da, the other his older brother Tony. They both followed George into piano tuning; he got them apprenticeships in Piggotts.

"They were there until it burned down in 1968 when, as with a lot of others who worked for Piggotts, they went out on their own as private tuners.

"My Dad, who was called Alec, had been covering the south-east for Piggotts, tuning from Kildare to Wexford and on over to Carlow. He was a Clontarf man and my mother, Eileen Ryan, was from just down the road in Fairview. She worked in Piggotts too, where she was the boss's secretary, very posh at the time. They had four girls and me and, in 1957 after we started to come along, my father decided to base himself in Carlow. He couldn't keep travelling up and down to Dublin in an old Morris Minor! I was reared in Carlow but brought to Dublin to get born in the Rotunda."

McCulloughs, he explains, were "an old company, in Belfast since 1909, who came to Dublin when Piggotts burned down in Grafton Street in 1968, set up and became McCullough Piggott".

In Carlow, after his Leaving Cert, John Holland served an apprenticeship as a piano tuner with his father. He was 17 years old.

"I began on a Monday morning, down on my hands and knees cleaning pedals, crying my eyes out over a girl who'd broken it off with me on the Saturday before. I couldn't join the Foreign Legion so . . .

"The apprentice system in most places - McCulloughs, Gills, wherever - was father-to-son. You didn't have to be musical; I play, but not brilliantly. I was five years with my father and we got on great. I wasn't well paid. My father used say 'you've got your bed and food and what more do you want?' We played sports together, everything. He's 80 next year and as active as ever and still dabbling in the business. It'll be 30 years on August 19th, 2006 since I started in the business myself."

There's a father-to-daughter element in the business too: Sandra, one of his sisters, is a piano tuner in Carlow. His three other sisters - Ann, Stephanie and Paula - made other life choices.

John Holland then comes to what he calls "the interesting bit"; the love of his life and wife, Lucy.

"She's from Youghal and I was 20 when we started going together. We got married in 1985. I was 26. What happened then was that the manager of the piano department in McCullough Piggott, Michael Tobin, retired. He was an institution in the music world, went around the country in a van and recorded all the choirs in all the convents. I applied for his job and got it and, when I moved from Carlow to Dublin, the wheel had come full circle and I was back where my family had started in pianos three generations before."

There's no stopping him, he's indefatigable, burning bright with the memory of it all, and with ideas.

"The plan was that I would build up knowledge and skills and go back to Carlow and develop the family business. But I met Henry Gillanders, from a family of Scots planted 400 years ago around Monaghan, and in marketing in McCullough Piggott. In May 1990 we set up Pianos Plus, a complete piano business with piano sales as our core business but with concert hire very big too, and a service area devoted to tuning, repairing and moving pianos. We set up on Fosters Avenue, in an old RTÉ stores there."

He takes a breath.

"It was very shaky at first; summer's a quiet time in pianos. Then came the Iraq war, which affected people's confidence about buying luxury goods. We got through because of support from piano teachers. The name Holland," he displays a modest pride, "is huge in the piano business. Lucy was a mainstay at the time. She's a career banker and, having her as a backbone, meant we could take risks. Her support was huge. We got over the initial hump, became established and the best brands in the world wanted to talk to us; Yamaha, Kawai, Steinway & Sons."

With a staff of five, the founders, David Holohan in accounts (where he is still) and two tuners, they moved to Rathgar Road and, simultaneously, opened a shop on Wellington Quay selling pianos and digital pianos. The changing city and traffic moved them on, as it did many other city centre businesses.

"At 7am, with only seagulls crying and empty streets, we'd be told to move on when loading up pianos. There was nowhere to park and we couldn't run the logistics of the business. We outgrew the square footage we had too, needed more space to show off the larger range."

They'd bought the Rathgar Road premises, which helped finance moves and development. In 2002 they moved to Piano House, Centrepoint Business Park, Dublin 12. You can see them from the M50, a tasty, custom-built four floor building with a grand piano dominant in a high window. Inside, the place shines with waiting pianos, upright, traditional and classical, most a glowing ebony but some mahogany and walnut finished too. A piano breeding ground, John Holland calls it, and that's what it is.

The rock industry comes to their door for pianos. So does the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the DIT Conservatory. Enya's bought pianos from them, and The Corrs and Paul Brady.

"We're the sole supplier to the Axa Dublin Piano Competition, one of the biggest piano competitions in the world," Holland says, pleased as punch.

They've a staff of 10; tuners, movers, clerical and financial. Holland travels a lot, liaising with educators. He's been to the UK, LA, Frankfurt and Jakarta in the last few months. Henry Gillanders, as financial controller, looks after development.

The piano, John Holland says, "was officially 300 years old in 2002. It's stood up to everything through that time; the guitar revolution of the 1960s, keyboards, MP3 players. At the end of the day it's the king of instruments."

What then about the coming generation of Hollands? "At seven, my daughter, Corey, keeps wanting to come to work with me. Evan, my son, is 10 and wants to play the digitals. She's got the spark and chat, he's darker and deeper." Could just be the combination to run a piano business.