At home in a pig sty: how one creative couple carved a spacious home and gallery from a rundown barn after falling for the Fens

The Fens don’t fit the ideal of a rolling green and pleasant land, says painter Fred Ingrams, 55.

“The only sounds are distant tractors and the call of birds. And yet they are anything but flat and featureless.”

Fred lived above Soho’s Coach & Horses pub in his twenties, mixing with artists such as Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst. Bacon became a regular drinking partner and, against his own maxim of “owning virtually nothing”, bought one of Fred’s large oils.

When the Nineties recession hit, Fred — son of Richard Ingrams, former editor of Private Eye and The Oldie magazines — supplemented his income by working as a graphic designer and art director on magazines and newspapers, including the Evening Standard. At House & Garden he met Laura Arie the magazine’s decorations editor, who became his wife.

They lived in Laura’s one-bedroom Notting Hill flat but it was bursting at the seams with a new baby, and with Fred’s children from his first marriage, Otis and Queenie, coming to stay.

Fred was looking at images of Norfolk and the Fens on Google Earth one day. “I came across this long, green feature in the landscape, surrounded by regimented fields. I couldn’t work out what it was so I started driving and found myself on the 100ft bank of the Ouse, looking out over the flooded washes at all the wildlife and birds. I was blown away and realised I’d found the landscape I wanted to paint.”

Not only did Fred fall in love with the abstracted beauty of the Fens, East Anglia’s iconic coastal plains, he and Laura decided to build a house there. Today they live in a modernist glass and metal-roofed barn conversion in the Norfolk village of Great Ellingham, near the Cambridgeshire border.

When they first saw it, it was rat-infested and used for keeping pigs. “We felt it had potential,” says Fred.

With London architect Jeremy Walker, they drew up plans to convert the Seventies asbestos-clad, steel-framed barn into a spacious, contemporary home, allowing an adjoining 16th-century barn to be saved from conversion.

The cement fibre-sheet roof was replaced with a Kingspan roll-formed metal roof. They kept the frame and foundations of the 40ft-square prefab and the house was assembled kit-style. “This house is entirely made of wood and glass. No cement or brick,” says Fred.

“The foundations were fine and we clad the outside in Siberian larch, which fades to a beautiful grey, and added insulation and plasterboard on the inside. All roof pieces and joists came in sections, so there was little labour-intensive building work.”

The house won a Campaign for Rural England Design Award — and it’s no surprise that the decor is so stylish. Laura has worked with everyone from Colefax and Fowler to Gucci and Burberry. Decorated in shades of grey and white, the house is a modern, flexible space that doubles as a gallery for Fred’s colour-saturated canvases.

A log basket by Fred’s son, leather designer Otis Ingrams, has pride of place alongside two antique leather armchairs, a collection of Scandinavian glass, deer antlers and gold-framed etchings. Laura stresses they worked to a tight budget — the Brazilian slate tiles are from Norwich Tile Centre.

High-performance glazing fills the house with light and draws the outside in. Fred loves the huge skies, crisscross of ditches, drains, water towers and telegraph poles of the Fens and realised they had a huge following when he posted his first landscape online: “A woman in New Zealand contacted me asking if she could buy it, because her grandfather had worked in that field.”

Trains from Diss to Liverpool Street take 90 minutes and the couple still have strong links with London, for Laura’s design consultancy work, visiting Fred’s children, and for the ballet, opera and art exhibitions. Fred will exhibit 20 new works in acrylic next month at Chelsea’s Iris Studios.

Fred Ingrams: Edge of Landscape, presented by Nick Holmes Fine Art, at Iris Studios, Adrian Mews, Ifield Road, SW10, June 26-29; prices from £2,000 to £6,500.