I turned an antiques shop into a colourful family home

Every surface of Albion House is like a canvas for Adam Calkin, a decorative artist and designer with a penchant for trompe l’oeil, a type of paint trickery that fools the eye into perceiving a detail as a three-dimensional object.

“There’s no profound element to my decorating other than I do like a bit of humour,” Calkin says, modestly. “This is what I do for other people all the time. And doing it at home — although I do hate DIY — did give me a chance to do things that I wanted to do that I couldn’t always do for my clients.”

The kitchen is a riot of colour and pattern

Three decades ago, when Calkin bought the rundown 18th-century property in the pretty Wiltshire village of Atworth with his ex-wife, Charlotte (the