Roxanna Allen began with a stall in Blackrock Market, then opened Rococo just in time to capture the spirit of boho. Now she's about to open her fourth boutique, run by Emma Barnett, reports Róisín Ingle.
Walking into Rococo, Roxanna Allen's boutique, is like wandering into a sartorial fairy tale and being assaulted by a colourful explosion of silks and taffeta, sequins and sparkles, ruffles and bows. Brides and debutantes come for gowns, ladies who lunch come for elegant outfits and fashion students come to ogle the delicate creations and faint over the price tags.
Others still come to check out the latest in Noa Noa, the Danish line set up by two brothers, Harald and Lars Holstein, and beloved of women all over Europe since the early 1980s. Despite the fact that this pretty, quirky and reasonably priced range - including appliqued cotton skirts, boiled wool coats, silver clogs, orange wellies and sequinned belts - can be found in shops all over the country, Emma Barnett of Rococo says that fans still tend to think of it as their little secret. When Allen opens Ireland's first dedicated Noa Noa franchise, in Dublin this week, the secret will be well and truly out.
Allen, a bubbly and brown-eyed mother of two, confesses to not being keen on interviews, but she is surprisingly unguarded for that. Within a few minutes of meeting to discuss the fourth store in her growing retail empire, she is telling me about the time she was due to marry her boyfriend of 20 years and business partner, Daryl Krywoniz, and how the pair of them called the whole thing off at the last minute.
"We tried very hard to get married," she giggles, explaining that she met the Canadian in New Zealand when she went travelling, on a whim, leaving behind her secure job with an insurance company. The couple backpacked together for five years, before Allen returned to Ireland to study at Grafton Academy of Dress Designing, and Krywoniz went back to Canada to study for an English degree.
"He came back to Dublin four days before the wedding, and we hadn't seen each other for six months," she says. "I was still sewing sequins on to my dress and organising seating arrangements and doing everything else you do. When he arrived he wanted to chat and catch up, but I had no time. We were slamming doors and arguing when the five-tiered chocolate cake arrived at the door, and we both just looked at each other and said: 'We can't do this.' It was very traumatic.
"Daryl went cycling around Ireland and I went underground, leaving my parents to deal with all the relatives. Within three days we were back together again. We realised we loved each other very much, but the whole thing was just too stressful."
The couple now have two daughters, 10-year-old Naoise and six-year-old Sophie, and work together, running the Rococo outlets in central Dublin; Glasthule, in south Co Dublin; and Galway.
Allen started making clothes as a girl growing up in the Co Cork town of Castletown Bere, in a Church of Ireland family. Her father, who worked for the Commissioners of Irish Lights, was covered "head to toe" in the tattoos of a sailor; her mother is an "elegant woman" and "a hoarder of antiques".
When the family moved to Dublin, Allen went to boarding school, made debs dresses for friends and generally went "a bit wild" as a teenager. Her entrepreneurial spirit may come from her grandmother, who left England for Ireland during the second World War to launch a career smuggling butter, meat, silk stockings and other goods back to England under her dress, pretending to be pregnant. "She was a character," says Allen.
After graduating from the academy, Allen began designing knitwear and started retail life, with a stall at Blackrock Market. At the height of her designing success she had 32 knitters churning out her creations and was exporting all over the world. Getting a loan to open her first shop was difficult, but when she did she was determined that Rococo would offer more than was available to Irish women at the time.
"I opened Rococo during a period when everything on offer was quite androgynous. I never liked that style. I was always into floaty, feminine pieces made from scrumptious fabrics with loads of gorgeous detailing, so they were the things I stocked," she says.
At the beginning, her lack of retail experience showed. "I would go on buying trips abroad and see a fabulous top I just loved and order loads of them. Customers would ask, 'Well, what goes with it?' and I'd say [ adopts slightly peeved voice]: 'I don't know, it's just a fabulous top. I love it. Don't you love it?' It was a tough learning curve, but after a year I got the hang of it."
That mix-and-match ethos still pervades Rococo, where staff have fun throwing together the 52 labels it stocks and experimenting with accessories. "There is nothing better than getting a customer in the changing room and pretending she is your real-life Barbie doll," says Allen. "That is when this business is most fun, although I spend hardly any time on the shop floor these days."
She was drawn to Noa Noa because of its use of organic fabrics and the creativity of its clothes. Although Noa Noa is already available in places as disparate as Nutgrove Shopping Centre, in south Dublin, and Clifden, in Co Galway, the new shop is the first in Ireland to carrying the entire range, including the Noa Noa Miniatures children's line.
"The beauty of the label is in the unusual combinations of colours and patterns. It's really for people who like fun and functional clothes," says Barnett, who will move from Rococo's Westbury Mall branch to manage the new shop, a few doors down. "You can stand out in Noa Noa without trying too hard."
As for Allen, she is still toying with the idea of one day opening a shop carrying just her own designs. "Well, that's the dream," she says. Given her record, this is one fairy tale likely to have a happy ending.
Noa Noa opens in the Westbury Mall, Dublin, beside the main entrance to the Westbury Hotel, on Thursday