Masterly makeover: revamped Kettle's Yard gallery is an art gem just an hour from London, with 3,000 new homes on the doorstep

One of the rituals at Kettle’s Yard gallery in Cambridge is for a volunteer to nip to Waitrose to find the perfect yellow lemon to place on a 16th-century pewter plate in the permanent collection. Instant Still Life with Lemon.

The gallery was the home of Jim Ede (1895-1990) — painter, art collector and pioneering Tate curator — and his art teacher wife, Helen, and has been extended repeatedly since he donated it to the University in the late Sixties.

London-based architect Jamie Fobert’s latest intervention opened last week. Fobert has restored important interiors by architect Sir Leslie Martin (1908-2000) and built neutral new galleries within the shell of a 19th-century terrace property next door.

Fobert is on something of a roll, with recently completed extensions at Tate St Ives and the news that he is to remodel the National Portrait Gallery.

Originally a backwater terrace of four knocked-together derelict cottages, Kettle’s Yard is now an important regional gallery.

The cottage interiors remain much as they were when Ede began opening his house to students interested in his collection of contemporary art, antiques, ancient artefacts and found objects.

Ede was interested in the both the primitive and the avant-garde. This spectrum, combined with the move from highly decorative Victorian museum interiors to the plain “white cube” art gallery of the 20th century, led to the emergence of a particular English domestic aesthetic that combined these elements.

“A living place where works of art could be enjoyed,” wrote Ede, “where young people could be at home, unhampered by the great austerity of the museum or public art gallery.” He befriended artists and amassed a collection that includes Miró, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.

Students would ring the Kettle’s Yard doorbell for a tour of its whitewashed interior, where paintings might be displayed at armchair height and a row of round pebbles on a windowsill culminates in a ancient axe-head masquerading as a tiny Hepworth sculpture.

Busts stand on a piano and on a pedestal formed from the giant timber screw of an old wine press.

Good old rugs and battered furniture suggested a life well-lived. A 1970 extension by Martin with brick floors and whitewash continued the pattern with furniture and books joining the art, blurring the domestic and the public.

A famously elongated sofa, removed for the recent refurbishment, revealed itself to be two humble single beds end-to-end once the white covers were off.

This was an influential Anglo version of l’art de vivre — the art of living — although the French foodie aspect of this bypassed the Edes.

It was said you had dinner before eating at the Edes, while their alcohol-free soirées at a previous home in Hampstead ended promptly at 10.

Property notebook

You don’t need an ancient cottage as a setting to live like Ede. A similar aesthetic works just as well within a modernist frame.

For those priced out of central Cambridge, the settlement of North West Cambridge, just outside the city, is where 3,000 clean-lined homes are being built using some of the country’s most talented architects such as Witherford Watson Mann, Alison Brooks and Stanton Williams.

The aim is for half of these homes to be affordable.