01
Engineer it, then sell it
Julie reads the test reports before the sales sheets. Declared performance set against measured, decibels quoted at night as well as at their best. What cannot be evidenced does not appear.
Heritage
Two generations, one discipline. What began on a factory floor in 1973 is now fitted, quietly, into London houses.
The inheritance
Julie Doherty grew up with engineering. In 1973 her father Arthur and four colleagues left a firm in Newry, Co Down, and set up what is now Glen Dimplex, a privately owned group of more than 8,000 people operating in over 20 countries.
They started with five directors, fewer than ten employees, and one product they had designed and engineered themselves. That was the standard Julie was raised on, and it has never left her.
She took the same instincts into a different trade. Julie qualified as an optometrist — a discipline of fine tolerances, where a lens is right or it is wrong by a fraction of a millimetre, and the person wearing it always knows. She spent a number of years as a director at Specsavers, a challenging, customer-facing and competitive business where premium meant the aftercare as much as the product.
She has been drawn to engineering and design all her life. Coole & Frost is where the two meet — her father's engineering and her own eye for tolerance — applied to something she wanted in her own London home and could not find. Heating and cooling that works properly in a period house, and that she was not embarrassed to look at.
What Arthur handed down was not a business. It was three principles, and they are what Coole & Frost is built on.
Julie reads the test reports before the sales sheets. Declared performance set against measured, decibels quoted at night as well as at their best. What cannot be evidenced does not appear.
A good machine fitted badly is a bad machine. Our own engineers, our own standards, and a house left exactly as we found it.
A five-year guarantee is worth exactly what the willingness to honour it is worth. In her father's house that was not a policy. It was manners.
An hour in your house, honest advice about whether this suits it, and a fixed quote. Julie still comes to most first visits.