Rick and Anny Sheepshanks’ rural Suffolk home is a bustling and busy place where there are always hungry mouths to feed. There are their children, Ruby, 4, Wilf, 3, and 3-month-old Finn, 7 dogs, 2 cats, plus the friends, family and colleagues who pop in for a chat, but often stay for lunch or tea. Even flocks of wild birds are catered for, with at least 35 seed-filled feeders dotted around the acres of grounds and gardens.

The house, built in 1890, once belonged to the head gardener of Rendlesham Hall, at a time when the estate was maintained by a team of 32. The Hall has since gone, but one of its dramatic arches, along with the gardener’s house, stable block, walled kitchen garden and collection of mature cedar and chestnut trees, survive.

“When we moved in two years ago, we needed space for our growing family and expanding food business, but the place required repair and restoration,” says Rick. “Half of the house, the section we think was once the pig house, is the offices of our business, Essfoods, while the stables, which had already been converted, house the commercial kitchens and development area.

“Outside, we patched up the Gothic archway and gargoyles to make them safe and rebuilt some of the walls around the main garden, and we have more or less got the grounds under control.”

While rebuilding the walls and sorting out the grounds, Rick created five small arbours or “sitting and thinking” places, as he likes to call them, although Anny surreptitiously refers to them as his “bus shelters”. A grateful kestrel has taken up residence in the restored arch, while deer frequent the lushly planted field beyond the property.

Inside the house, carpets were removed and walls stripped of Formica and woodchip. The internal kitchen wall was knocked down to create an open living space. The inner surface of the arch created by the demolition is painted with blackboard paint and used for writing up long shopping and to-do lists, as well as providing Wilf with an outlet for his artistic talents. The remaining walls of the kitchen and adjacent sitting and dining areas are painted in a striking shade of pink. “I put up test areas of a nasty turquoise colour and an unpleasant shade of apricot, so in the end Rick gave in to my wish for a pink kitchen,” says Anny. But if you think the kitchen in pink catches the eye, it pales into insignificance next to what she calls “my happy cupboard”, the walk-in larder, which has an interior painted in an intensely vivid shade of the colour.

The sitting and dining areas consist of a large wooden table surrounded by high-back wicker chairs and a well-filled dresser. On the other side of the Georgian-style fireplace are two sofas facing each other in front of French windows, which open on to the walled flower garden and lawn at the side of the house.

Upstairs, the main bedroom and en suite bathroom are decorated with dark green and blue tartan wallpaper and a collection of animal paintings and prints. The bedroom has a dual aspect with windows at the foot of the bed looking out to the Gothic archway and Rick’s vegetable patch, and at the side overlooking the lawn and an avenue of broad-trunked trees. The windows are dressed with thickly lined red curtains which complement the tartan wallpaper, picking up on its fine stripe.

In the adjacent bathroom, a roll-top bath was placed under the window so the pastoral view could be enjoyed while relaxing in comfort. Rows of shelves, devoted to various bath preparations and perfumes, hint that bathing at the Sheepshankses’ may be a very pleasurable experience.

What was once Rick’s study has recently been made over into Finn’s nursery, and the desk that has been replaced by a cot is now located at the bottom of the stairs by the front door. Fortunately, the entrance hall is large enough to accommodate it, along with a wall of well-stuffed bookshelves and various photographs and paintings.

Ruby and Wilf share a bedroom and have their own blue and white bathroom next door. Wilf has a splendid raised bed with a racing track and burgeoning collection of dinosaurs underneath it, while Ruby has her “princess bed” with a white voile tent draped around its head. The walls are decorated with pale blue paper printed with a Fifties-style dog motif, a design enjoyed by the children and the rescued canine companions with whom they share the home.

When not helping their mother in the kitchen – where Ruby is an expert at applying generous amounts of lemon curd to freshly baked sponge cakes and Wilf is skilled at strategically placing dollops of strawberry jam in pastry tart cases – the pair find time to help their father put up this year’s “family” of scarecrows in the tree in the middle of the vegetable patch. All this energetic work gives them healthy appetites, but there’s plenty of good food on hand.

Not only does Rick’s vegetable patch supply seasonal veg, herbs and salad leaves, but across the courtyard from the house, the Essfood team of cooks and food technologists prepares and produces the fruit-filled jams, curds and marmalades, tomato sauces, mayonnaise and onion marmalade that bear the company’s Stokes and Staverton Ewe labels.

The Sheepshankses’ home may be miles from local shops, but they can always pop next door for a pot of jam or bottle of ketchup. All the ingredients, one might say, for a happy country life.

www.essfoods.co.uk

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