About thirty odd years ago things were different for artists Colin Ruffell and his wife Fran Slade. Then, with their small daughter and another baby on the way, they were living in a hardboard caravan on Hayling Island, in Hampshire.

All the tourists had gone home for the winter, but the doughty pair hung on waiting for Colin’s student grant to come through.

"It took ages," Fran recalls, "but in the end it came!"

Ever the artist, Fran found Hayling Island quite beautiful in the winter. "The little shopping centre was like a shanty town, with pavements raised high above the road because of floods," she says.

Through thick and thin they have stuck to their guns, and to each other, having decided that artists they were, and artists they’d remain. Colin taught for a year but then, fortunately for them, the school burned down. "I decided I didn’t want to teach in a corridor, opposite the lavatories, and I’ve never been back to teaching since."

Over the years fate has, on the whole, been kind, though the recession hit hard.

"Recently," says Fran, smiling as ever, "we’ve experienced a certain degree of downsizing. We did leave a much bigger place to move to this flat. But actually we love it and we’ll be really blissful once we’ve rebuilt the studio in the garden."

The flat is the extensive ground floor of a handsome Victorian house in Brighton, previously owned by a motorbike fanatic whose priorities didn’t run to Victorian stained glass or the supremacy of sash windows. It left quite a lot to be desired.

Since this was a situation Colin and Fran had overcome with some relish in all their previous houses, things simply couldn’t have been better.

And so, with the eye of not one but a pair of artists and a commensurate degree of elbow grease, they've managed in six years to get their home to their liking.

The kitchen - previously the second bedroom - is the case in point. "I couldn’t," says Fran with a shudder, "bear to go out and spend thousands of pounds on a ready-made kitchen. I don’t mind standing and admiring them in shops, but I just want my own."

Which is what, in close consultation with Colin, she got. "I’d done the whole pine thing", she says. "We’d had a wonderful pine kitchen in our previous house. I didn’t want to do it again - and anyway, this space would have been too small. I wanted a clean-cut look, a combination of wood and stainless steel, something simple but stylish."

The work-tops are in fact solid maple. These are leftovers from a salvaged gymnasium floor which they also used in the serene sitting room that leads directly to the Victorian conservatory. The conservatory was found disguised under a galvanised roof, and they recreated it step by step, bit by bit. Now this conservatory, with its green paint-work, and mauve and crimson violets, is sheer enchantment. Beyond, of course, lies Fran’s magic garden…but that’s another story.

Another story, too, is in the main bedroom with its lovely original fireplace and its stunning Christmas cake of a ceiling. Both these features were coated in many layers of an indescribably baleful blue to which a thin coating of white had been added. The effect was, says Fran, "Eerie, a terrible sort of blue glow."

But rather than scrape off all the aforementioned horrors, they decided to paint over in pink. "Over the top!" says Fran. "I know….but over the years I’ve grown fond of that ceiling. I’m a great believer in, if you can’t make it, fake it".

"Our philosophy," says Fran, "is that you can make practically anything look good. Don’t worry too much about the outcome. If it hasn’t cost much, you can always change it, and remember, you’re not expecting the decor to last 100 years. Do it for now - and enjoy it!"

Words by Eithne Power, original photography by Tony Timmington

From Creative Ideas Magazine October 1997