Trade NamesThe trend may be towards globalisation, but Kelly's Hotel in Rosslare is staying a family-owned and run business. Rose Doyle reports

A cross between MC and choreographer, Bill Kelly moves attentively through the Saturday evening diners in Kelly's Hotel, Rosslare. Solicitous, smiling, personal and perfectly pitched, neither he nor his staff miss a step nor cue. The food is good too.

This is a hotelier bred to the business. Born with inn-keeping in his bones, he's the fourth generation of Kelly's to run a business which is in truth a south-east, if not national, institution.

Kelly's is the story of a business that grew by keeping an eye on the times that were in it. Service and the needs of the guest are all; this was the hotel which, decades ago, set the trend in leisure activities, the place where hoteliers used take their holidays, where a Kelly coined the phrase "the sunny south-east" and where they always knew how to take advantage of natural advantages, like the kilometres of golden beach and exuberant growth on the doorstep.

It started modestly enough when William J and Mary Kelly, Bill Kelly's great-grandparents, opened a tea rooms on the site of today's hotel in 1895. The spot, by the beach as rail links began to open up, was given to them by Mary's family and was both ideal and timely. In no time at all William J, an accountant by training, had seized the opportunities inherent and applied for a hotel licence.

Things moved with swift success from the beginning. By 1902 William J was building the first and original hotel, by 1905 it had opened. "Here, on this spot on Rosslare strand," the fourth generation Bill confirms. "The small drawingroom, part of the restaurant and some bedrooms are all part of that first building."

There were 15 rooms in that first hotel. There are 123 today. Other things have changed, too. Bill Kelly tells how it happened: "The railways were what established and made the hotel," he says. "Mary, my great-grandmother, played a big part in the business and my grandmother, Kathleen Kelly, was the stronger influence on the business in her turn. They were both strong women, as was my mother, Breda. She needed to be, after my father died."

Bill Kelly, in his marriage, may well have established the hotel's continuity. He met Isabelle Avril from Chateauneuf-du-Pape when they were both studying hotel management in Lausanne. As the parents of six daughters, and with hospitality genes on both sides, a hotel business woman or two is a possibility. "We'll see what happens," their father says, "hotel business is more of a vocation."

Kelly's Hotel grew with the 20th century. Bill Kelly remembers his grandfather, Nicholas, son of William and Mary: "He was an avid gardener, photographer and bird enthusiast who got together one of the most important historical collections of photos in the south-east. He was also the one who coined the phrase about this being the 'sunny south-east'. And he was right."

With the sun golden on the beach outside there was no arguing this, that day anyway. What's certain is that Kelly's appeal drew the great and the often good over the years. George Bernard Shaw visited in the 1920s and wrote of Rosslare's "infinite peace", former President Sean T O'Ceallaigh was a guest in 1912, and W T Cosgrave stayed in the 1930s. Later times saw Sean Lemass and, regularly, Sir Robert McAlpine.

"When my father, Billy Kelly, took over in the 1950s, there were 36 beds and business was still a seasonal four or five months of the year," Bill Kelly says, and the da set about change. "He pioneered off-season holidays in Ireland and encouraged people to come by giving them activities with which to engage and divert themselves while staying. He pioneered saunas and steam rooms and squash courts, as well as nightly entertainment."

It wasn't all work. Romance had its day too. When Breda Emly came from Tipperary to work as a receptionist in Kelly's, Billy picked her up from the train station. "They never looked back," says their son of their love-at-first-sight meeting. "My mother did everything, as receptionists did in those days. She chefed in the kitchen, helped with the books."

Breda Kelly was also the one responsible, in the main, for getting together the hotel's art collection. One of the finest in the country, it includes work by Jack B Yeats to Mary Swanzy to Louis le Brocquy, Tony O'Malley, Elizabeth Magill and Mick O'Dea.

Billy Kelly, according to his son, "was an out-and-out hotelier, president of the Irish Hotels Federation and all that sort of thing, for his sins. Time was in the mid-1960s, and they were five-star days - when we had one bathroom to every four bedrooms. Growth and change meant the bedrooms had to be enlarged and made en suite. From 36 bedrooms in the 1950s, the hotel, when I came back from studying in Switzerland in 1986, had become an all year round destination with 89 rooms."

Billy and Breda Kelly had five daughters and two sons before, 25 years ago when his son Bill was 15, Billy died. Breda Kelly hired a general manager and took over the running of the hotel. When Bill Kelly jnr took over in 1986 one of the things he realised was that "the staff was part of the bigger family of the hotel and that, if I was to have any impact, I needed to gain the respect and trust of this team/family before I could begin to start developing the product. I still consult with staff and management - they mightn't say so but I do! A lot of the team are with the hotel for years and years, many up to 40 years.

"A crucial element in running a hotel is a good and welcoming staff. Our staff create the ethos - we've 210 employees and an ongoing training procedure and training school on the premises. Many of our customers have grown with the hotel, too, bringing generations of business. We'd know a lot of customers to see. I wouldn't be great at names - I'd be good at faces - and where people like to sit in the restaurant and what bedroom they like."

Bill Kelly doesn't really see today's hotel - with its Aqua Club and Orangerie Terrace, landscaped gardens, acclaimed restaurant and, just opened, Seaspa therapeutic centre - as being "better" than the Kelly's of the 1970s. "I only see us keeping up with standards," he says, "in keeping with 21st century demands, keeping the product up to date. I want to hand on in a good state what was handed on to me."

The €5 million Seaspa effectively adds a health centre to Kelly's. An oasis of calm and therapeutic waters, it was designed by Quilligan Architects and has timber, stone and light in measures which soothe and restore. It is Bill Kelly's pride and joy. "It's about customers' wellness and need to de-stress," he says. "It's to help them take time out from the demands of today and tomorrow."

Breda Kelly is still involved with the hotel and her son is adamant that Kelly's will remain a unique and one-off family-owned hotel. "The worldwide move is towards globalisation of product but we intend keeping our relationship with our customers individual and personal."