TradeNames: Despite its relative youth, Churchtown Stores has adopted an old-fashioned approach to quality customer service, writes Rose Doyle

The Flood brothers and Churchtown Stores: Do It Yourself Centre are much celebrated in Dublin 14. There's been a provisions shop of one kind or another on their Braemor Road spot since the early 1950s but Fehan, Barry and Kieran Flood have been there a relatively short time - since 1988 is all. It's the way they run the place that's put them, and it, on the map.

Churchtown Stores is very deliberately old-style - "run the old way" as Barry puts it. Service is attentive and helpful in the extreme. The customer is paramount.

The stores carry everything and more the householder/gardener could ever want and, if by a fluke or bad luck your need is not to hand, the Floods will get it for you. They'll tell you how to do most things too - between them they've more electrical engineering and DIY experience than in a builders' manual.

The flowers are the first thing, covering the pavement outside and a newish innovation, according to Fehan Flood. Inside, it's the smell that pulls you back in time, the heady mixture of oil and nails and paint and wood that was every hardware store in everyone's youth.

Fehan Flood elects to tell their tale. He's more than adequate to the job, generous with time and detail, courteous, precise and unhurried.

"We took over the place in 1988 from a man called Seamus O'Reilly who owned it," he says. "He'd had it for a very, very long time. Before him it had been a vegetable shop. When we took it over there was very little in it; a small amount of hardware and mostly solid fuel like coal, briquettes, logs. There was a large number of gas canisters too, Kosan Gas, etc."

The Floods came to Churchtown from north London where, after leaving Co Westmeath, they'd been building an electrical/hardware business since the mid-1960s. This in itself is a story.

They were a large family, nine young Floods in all (five boys, three girls) born to Sean and May Flood of Hounslow House, Fore, Castlepollard, Co Westmeath.

Sean Flood taught in the local national school for 44 years. May choose to stay at home and rear their children.

How they run their business today, their closeness as siblings and charitable view of the world is all, Fehan says, to do with "how we were brought up. The family is very important to me, to all of us. All nine of us live within an hour-and-a-half's drive from one another and we visit all the time. I know I can speak for my two brothers when I say we get great pleasure from serving people, hearing their stories, good and bad, helping any way we can."

Fehan Flood was born in 1948 and and on his 21st birthday he and Barry started working together, and renting, an electrical sales, service and TV shop at Crouch End, north London. Both of them had trained as electrical engineers.

In 1975, when the landlord wanted to increase the rent five-fold, they bought the hardware shop across the road. Barry joined them from Finsbury Park where he'd been managing a hardware shop.

"In those days," Fehan says, "people thought that, in having hardware and electrical in one shop, we were going off our heads. But for us it's been very successful and we've never looked back."

They came back to Ireland for family reasons; on foot of a long term plan.

"We'd all married and had families and had always intended to come home before the children got too old and settled there," Fehan explains, adding a few family statistics.

"I'm married to Margaret, Kieran to Breege and Barry to Noreen. I've two daughters, Charlotte and Roselle. My son, John Paul, died. Kieran has three boys, Declan, Kevin and Alan. Barry has Barry-John, Caroline, Adrian and Noreen."

In 1987, after a two-year planning period, they sold their homes and the Crouch End business and came back to Ireland, all of them.

"We'd no idea where we were going to live," he says, "not to mind work. It was a nightmare for a while."

They put an ad in one of the papers, trying to find a suitable business. "We got a lot of replies, some way over the top. They came from Ranelagh to all the counties in Ireland. We nearly settled on Gordons in Ranelagh but it didn't have a rear entrance. Then we got a phone call from someone who didn't give a name saying there could be a place in Churchtown. We narrowed it down and figured we were being tipped off about Churchtown Stores. So we called on Seamus O'Reilly. There were difficulties. It took nine months but we persisted and got it!"

They found houses, too, in Naas, all three of them. It was just Fehan, Kieran and Barry when they opened the stores in 1988. Now, between full and part-time staff, there are 20 employed in Churchtown Stores.

"We never have to advertise either," Fehan says, "we always get staff by word of mouth."

He talks, affectionate and aware, about their customers. "Many are of long standing, older people who want to live their lives out in the area. We'll know when a person is left a widow or widower, when they want help doing DIY on their own. We'll advise on what they need for a job, and how they should do it. They'll often come back, a big smile on their face, pleased they were able to do it themselves. People say to me 'you'd say Mass!' and I say, 'yes, Mass on Sunday and house repairs on a Wednesday'!"

Some people, he knows, think they're old-fashioned. "But the way we run things works for us here and it worked for us in the UK. Why fix it when it's not broken? We put customers in touch with good tradesmen and women too. People we can stand over."

There is more than 279sq m (3,000sq ft) of space in Churchtown Stores, divided into narrow, shelved aisles, every inch from floor-to-rafters packed tight.

Buckets, basins, twine, electrical appliances, nails, nuts, paint, bolts, chicken wire, Varian brushes and mats; everything in its place, a label and category for everything.

The Floods brought old-style metal storage cabinets back from the UK, built other, elaborate but precise versions, themselves.

People, mistakenly Fehan says, imagine a local hardware shop to be more expensive than the larger DIY stores.

"We ask customers to check out our prices," he says, "and know we're cheaper. We find that people in Ireland spend far more on their houses and gardens than people in the UK. I always tell customers to come in, get the right advice, even if they're not buying from us, rather than do the job incorrectly."

They open seven days a week since discovering, when doing repair work on the roof over three weekends, that customers wanted Sunday opening. Their big sellers are the flowers, then plumbing and painting necessities.

"Anything a plumber could want we have here," Fehan says, proudly. "All of our children have helped out and are helping out. Margaret works here two days a week. The stores are a way of life for us. We get so much pleasure coming in, listening to people's stories, giving help where we can. Great pleasure."