You can tell an awful lot about a businessman by his office. Some are nondescript and functional, some are open and inviting - others say simply 'I'm the boss' and entering Neville Johnson's domain it's pretty obvious that here's someone who likes people to know who's in charge.

Dark, wooden-panelled walls, huge desk, green leather chairs - every box in the old-school director's book of interior design is ticked. The only giveaway to the personality of the man behind it is the dozens of family pictures dotted on every available spare space.

Johnson himself couldn't be friendlier and more welcoming, like an avuncular Frank Finlay he bounds across the room and pumps my hand.

As he is interviewed, he frequently stops mid-sentence and bellows "off the record, off the record" before launching into another indiscrete and fabulously entertaining anecdote about customers, rivals, suppliers - anyone his free flowing mind throws up.

While this is all great fun, we're here to do an interview, so let's start with a bit of background.

Neville Johnson is the founder of Johnson & Johnson, a retailer and manufacturer of mainly kitchens, bedrooms and studies. Based in Trafford Park in Manchester the uninspiring frontage on the out of the way industrial estate belies a huge 15,000sq ft immaculate showroom with over 60 displays and large manufacturing unit out the back that supplies all his own products. The principle business is contractors and developers, but that showroom still pulls in £100,000 a week when it's busy, no small change.

Johnson started selling kitchens in the mid-1960s and between then and now the story takes in Kitchen Queen, Poggenpohl, Moben, and pioneering concepts like extended credit that are taken for granted today.

"In about 1963 I was working for my uncle, selling laminated plastic," he explains "and a relative asked me to do a kitchen for a friend and I ended up selling units out of a garage and it was really successful. I then went to a really small shop in Chapel Street in Manchester - it's a chip shop now or something, it was that kind of size."

The kitchen market at that time was, to say the least, limited.

"I was advertising units, that was my thing," he says. "Fitted kitchens in those days came from builder's merchants, there weren't any kitchen specialists so if you were a man in the street doing your kitchen your joiner or builder would go to Perkins or somewhere for you."

In the ten years following that garage, Johnson moved from Chapel Street to increasingly large outlets, slowly piling in more kitchens and honing what we would know today as a kitchen showroom.

In 1971-72 he moved to what became Kitchen Queen, a 36,000sq ft showroom with a disconcertingly heftier rent than he was used to - as a result he had no real money to stock it with.

"So I spoke to Poggenpohl," he says. "They had nothing in the UK at the time and the rep came to see me. I asked him all the usual questions 'how much is a 42in sink, how much is a 63in sink, how much is a 42in wall unit?' and he said 'we don't do it that way'.

"I had no idea what he meant. He said it was metric for a start and told me that people didn't look at the cost of a unit, they looked at the cost of the kitchen. This was a revelation to me, so I went over to Germany to see for myself and it really did look the business, so I was sold."

While, as with all successful people, it would be nice to think there was a grand master plan to Johnson's career, it's clear that, particularly in these early days there was, as with all entrepreneurs, a mixture of luck, judgement, bravery, risk and reward. He extended the Kitchen Queen showroom to include not just upper end Poggenpohl but mid-market Italian flatpack. It expanded to other showrooms in Leeds and Coventry and a manufacturing unit, DiLusso Kitchens, that sold to the likes of the original B&Q.

Moben

In 1978, Johnson floated the company and used the money to buy a carpet firm with a chain of showrooms and merged the business with Morris and Bentham and their fledgling direct sales business Moben. One of the initial acts was to introduce the first 'buy now pay later' scheme for kitchens. "It was just phenomenal, nobody was doing extended credit back then."

It wasn't to last however. Less than a year after floating the company Kitchen Queen was spreading by converting the carpet stores into showrooms and this caused a disagreement between the conflicting priorities of his Moben partners so he sold them his share of the business.

"At the end of the day, I had enough money to not want to go through the argument so I said, 'ok, it's all yours'". The rest is history, Moben grew and Kitchen Queen didn't.

So Johnson set up under his own name, Neville Johnson Kitchens, with a manufacturing unit specialising in kitchens and offices. With an md targeting the trade with rigid kitchens to the likes of Optiplan and the Co-Op and Johnson overseeing the office business, the 1980s saw both sides of the company grow to the point where, in 1993 the office furniture side of the business was sold along with the Neville Johnson name - the company still bears it now.

With the sale, the kitchen company was renamed Johnson & Johnson but, in fact, Neville went into semi-retirement dabbling occasionally in stocks and shares, leaving others to run the business day-to-day. In his absence, he admits the company didn't fare too well and while he is reluctant to detail the reasons why, he returned full time just over four years ago to take the helm once again.

While he says his return was out of necessity rather than enthusiasm I don't think this is entirely true. No matter how hard I try I can't imagine him ever sitting back with his feet up, he is a businessman, salesman and entrepreneur at heart and people like that get very bored very easily if they're not on the frontline.

So now the Johnson & Johnson business focuses on contract work but the customer retail side is more than a significant part of the business. The showroom was opened in 1998 to supplement the trade and building business, Johnson himself had overseen its opening as a way, one suspects, of keeping his hand in.

"When it's busy here, we're averaging £100,000 a week and about 300 people," he explains. "The average sale is £17,000 but I can do a kitchen for £5,000, three units for a media room for £4,000 and a kitchen for £20,000 so it depends. At the top end our kitchens can be £50-£60,000."

In truth, as soon as he says that 300 people come in a week, he pauses and calls his PA to bring in a large folder, he opens it and starts to read out day by day exactly how many customers have come through the door. The folder goes back years and gives Johnson a instant comparative measure of footfall.

When I tell him that the fact he can put his hands on this kind of information in an instant is something I haven't seen before he looks at me like I've just told him the sky is green.

"It's very basic isn't it?" he says. "I'm spending money advertising so I want to know how many people come in and where they've found out about us. I think it's critical to running a business."

While he insists his main business is housebuilders, it's clear the showroom and the retail customers are a labour of love, and while his showroom is spotless it is the small touches that make the Johnson & Johnson shopping experience unique.

For a start, the factory is literally through a door at the back of the showroom if you want to take a look at where your furniture is coming from and each display has a folder of pictures of that kitchen, bedroom or study in real homes.
There is a map, with floorplan, that customers can pick up on the way in to direct them round the showroom. There's a neat pamphlet entitled 'A guide to buying your new kitchen', laying out how to work out rough costs and choosing between 'needs and wants' - it even advises them to visit other kitchen specialists to shop around.

Then there's a budget planner that takes the customer through each general item - doors, handles, worktop, appliances - and gives them a rough guide price including installation.

"Nobody else does a budget planner like this," Johnson says. "Others will let people come in and try and find out how much they want to spend, and that's wrong. If you go into one or two of the posh high end showrooms they'll say 'our kitchens start at £40,000' but that's bollocks. Kitchens start with a 600mm base unit and a worksurface. If you want ten units, it will cost ten times as much."

Johnson's search for the perfect showroom also manifests itself in frequent visits around other stores -  something that also puzzles Johnson when I tell him most retailers don't do it. So what does he get out of it?
"I come back with a very varied picture - sometimes I return and look at the showroom and think its great, other times crap. I've got a list of 20 showrooms I've been to recently with notes on all and which ones have impressed me and which haven't. That lets me know what we need to do better, and where we are in the marketplace."
He shows me some of his notes - "very good range of products, traditional, too engineered, not hand made. Good on worktops etc." Another says - "Good quality, all very similar, all flat doors, some good displays - traditional is sh*t"

Downturn

The daily footfall figures in Johnson's file show a distinct drop since February this year, but he says, in retrospect, you can see the pattern developing over the previous 18 months. And, consumers aside, the crash in housebuilding has hit the contract side of the business significantly.

"In the North West we've had three builders go bust, the Midlands we've had another three," he says. "All very established. I have never known anything happen so quick, so hard and so sharp. Builders have just stopped halfway through, they're just not placing orders at the moment.

"All our competitors are chasing social housing, but there's no future in that. In my view, the Symphonys and Moores of this world are very good and they're going to chase and compete in that market, so there's no point going into it.
"I do know this business like the back of my hand, if I get 60 people a week rather than 90 then chances are I'm going to be a third down on sales, so I have to make it viable at that level no matter how painful it is. If I can't sell £8m of furniture a year to builders because they're 40% down, then that £8m will become £4.8m. I can only go with what's happening and hopefully I'm as good as or better than the guy next door."

But, as he points out himself, after 45 years he's seen economic dips and downturns come and go and he's still here. In testing times, experience is perhaps the most valuable asset of all.