Imagine, if you will, sitting in front of your fire one evening and thinking about where you would like to be in 2019. Rich and happy perhaps? Healthy, one would hope. And how about being the 100 per cent owner of six (almost seven) hotels and a bursting property portfolio for good measure?

That should be manageable, or at least it would be if you were publicity-shy hotelier Mr Noel O'Callaghan. Over the past decade and a half, he has built from scratch one of the Republic's most successful hotel groups, while keeping his finger in numerous multimillion-euro property pies in his spare time.

It sounds simple put like that but, of course, building a business of this scale requires a skill and willingness to which most of us can only aspire.

It also requires loyal lieutenants and Mr O'Callaghan has found his man with Mr Martin Cooley.

Mr Cooley, the group general manager of the O'Callaghan Hotels group, began his working life as an undertaker in the west before joining Mr O'Callaghan as a bar manager in in the legendary Clare's nightclub in Merrion Square close to 20 years ago.

He has since moved through the ranks of the company, just as he believes any of the 620 staff within the group should do.

The 15th birthday of the O'Callaghan Hotels group that Mr Cooley has helped nurture will be marked in style with the launch of the O'Callaghan group's first hotel in Boston and second in the US.

The new property, to be named the O'Callaghan Boston, is a symbolic purchase, since it marks both the success of the existing two-year-old US hotel investment in Maryland and the group's plans to expand even more in the US.

The Ames building is also a landmark property, well-known in Boston as the city's first skyscraper.

Until reasonably recently, the 1880-built property was in use as an office building but a number of hoteliers have been circling it over the past few months, eyeing its "boutique" appeal.

In the end, Mr O'Callaghan won the race for the $15.5 million (€11.3 million) property which it will now redevelop into a 120-room hotel of similar proportions to the group's Davenport in Dublin over the next 15 months. The scheduled opening date is March 2006.

Mr Cooley says this is unlikely to be the end of the group's expansion into North America, with another hotel likely to be opened in the region over the next three years.

In the meantime, the plan is to "maintain and grow" market share in Dublin, where the O'Callaghan village of hotels - including the original Mont Clare - has quietly grown to four properties, plus a set of corporate apartments.

The group also includes (bizarrely one might say) a hotel in Gibraltar, the tiny British colony best known for its rock.

This hotel - the Elliott - was treated to a €2 million refurbishment this year, bringing the total spent by the group on maintaining its properties in 2005 to €4.5 million

Mr Cooley estimates that turnover for this calendar year will be around 6 per cent ahead of budget at €40 million. He shies away from supplying profit figures, doling out instead the "we're a private company" line.

This is, of course, fair enough, but it does automatically lead to the temptation to pay a visit to the Companies Office, where a search on the hotel group provides a list of results sufficient to keep an accountant occupied for a decade.

Close to the top of a pyramid of intertwined companies is an operation called Brodnax, which has shares in a range of other hotel-rated entities.

The most recent results filed for this firm point to a group turnover of £22.2 million (€28.2 million) in 2001, and pre-tax profits of £6 million in the same year.

At a very rough estimate (that comes with every health warning in existence), this performance would point to pre-tax profits of about £11 million this year - depending on capital investment and a host of other variables.

In any case, growth of 6 per cent in turnover for 2004 (presuming this has in some way been mirrored in profits) is impressive in light of the performance of competing Dublin four-stars, such as those within the Jurys Doyle group.

Jurys' most recent interim numbers showed that profits at its Irish four-star portfolio were down 24 per cent in the first half of the year.

While growing economic buoyancy will probably have helped to address this in the meantime, it illustrates the pressure under which modern hoteliers operate.

This is where this year's multi-million refurbishment comes in, with Mr Cooley aware of how guests are more than capable of voting with their feet on sub-standard hotel accommodation.

For this reason, he says the hotel group is always on the move, with new ideas such as the introduction of wireless (local area networks) LAN in all of its properties. Given that the properties get about 67 per cent of their revenues from the business community, such innovations (this one cost just €100,000) make perfect sense.

Other initiatives include the development of a 40-minute "express" lunch that gets busy executives in and out without wasting any time.

Food and beverage business provides about 21 per cent of sales, with roughly a quarter coming from conferences and banqueting and the remainder from accommodation.

Mr Cooley and his colleagues are at the forefront of attempts to market the Republic, and Dublin in particular, as more of a "business tourism" destination.

This would see such tourists coming to the hotels to do their deals, before heading off to Wicklow or the west for a bit of sea and mountains.

It's a simple idea and one that could provide the real driver for O'Callaghan's profits over the next few years.