The fine art of living colour

"I'm very keen on colour," says Michelle, "particularly the colours of folk art."

Michelle and Conrad have infused their home with colour, usually through decoration rather than dcor. Neutral earthy paint colours in the sitting room, dining room and conservatory provide the backdrop for riotously colourful paintings both by Michelle and other family members, and grouped collections.

Most dramatic has to be the "orange collection". "That's Conrad's," explains Michelle. There's a huge assortment of orange objects accumulated over years and added to by friends and family. Clocks, ornaments, tins, lamps and even a vintage orange television make up the orange collection, which is displayed on a large floor-to-ceiling shelving unit in the sitting room.

Equally impactful and eccentric is Conrad's collection of clocks displayed on the dining room wall. He used to make clocks himself but found that that the job made a very poor living and so these days sticks to collecting and restoring them. He also collects and restores gramophone players and old factory clocking-in machines: examples of both can be found around the house.

The neutral background formula hasn't been followed in the hall or the kitchen – the hall is a rich cherry red and the kitchen is painted in vibrant ultramarine offset by pale yellow tiles.

Conrad also turns out to be a talented joiner and he has completely renovated the kitchen, installing natural wood units all made to a very high standard and hand-finished. As in the rest of the house, there is an emphasis on display in the kitchen with hanging poles and open shelving units that are practical as well as fun to look at.

Apart from its colourfulness and playfulness, the home has always had to maintain thoroughly practical elements as Michelle has multiple sclerosis and is now a wheelchair user.

"When we first saw the house, it had been on the market for a long time," says Michelle. "The lady who lived here previously also had MS and perhaps the fact that it was set up for a wheelchair user put people off. But for us it was absolutely ideal." This meant that the bathroom already had grabrails, and that the couple had less conversion work to do.

One alteration they have made is to create a ramp from the sun room out into the garden so that Michelle can easily get outside and enjoy this lovely haven.

"The builder who did the work for us has two sons who are wheelchair users so he was really sensitive to what was needed," says Michelle.

An intricately carved table in the garden shows off Conrad's joinery

skills once more, and at the back, up against the garden wall are handcarved panels created by Michelle and partly covered with ivy which give a sense of mystery to this pretty outdoor space.

A vibrant use of colour finds its way into Michelle's work, too.

In the past, she made large sculptural pieces using wood, which she would decorate with paint, while recently she has been printmaking and collaboratively creating small sculptural works with Conrad, glassmaker Nick Claiden and Paul Farago.

"Our process is very playful, we have been printing on to found objects such as bricks or pieces of wood, and perhaps scraping away the

surface to create interesting textures and effects," says Michelle, who often includes images of mermaids in her work.

"I'm interested in archetypal images and particularly archetypal images of women, so I also play around with domestic images, such as cookers or fridges. I like things to be read in more than one way."