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Several changes of employment led my wife, Nicola Fisher, who has died aged 59, to Sotheby’s in Chester in the late 1980s as the personal assistant to one of their furniture specialists. A recommendation based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of “conservation” then directed her not towards the natural world, but into the furniture restoration trade. She joined a small firm of antique restorers, working in a converted cowshed in rural Shropshire, where she and I met.

In the spirit of serendipity and opportunity, Nicola quickly mastered the art of gilding, developing this as an entirely new speciality for the firm and was responsible for the conservation of many fine 18th-century works, including at least one with provenance as a Chippendale original. The workshop also produced new work in 18th- and early 19th-century styles, which Nicola gilded in the traditional manner. She pursued this career for nearly 20 years.

Nicola, daughter to Ray and Sheila Fisher, was born in Darlington, and grew up in Surrey and then North Yorkshire as the family moved around Britain following Ray’s developing career in mechanical engineering. After what she always described as an indifferent education, Nicola progressed to secretarial college in Oxford, where she enjoyed the attractions of student life.

After her years in furniture restoration, another radical change of employment then took Nicola into community development work for Shrewsbury and Atcham borough council in 2003. In her first year there, she organised a music and arts festival for young people, which was an immediate success despite being funded on a shoestring. The Teenage Kicks festival ran for nearly 10 years before cuts in local government funding took effect.

Nicola’s involvement with Shrewsbury’s young folk led her to undertake an Open University degree in social science, in which she graduated with first-class honours.

She had a broad range of personal interests. From around 2007, she was a trustee of the West Mercia Women’s Aid charity for about 10 years, several of them as chair, and oversaw the running of the organisation with a seven-figure budget, two refuge houses and a staff of nearly 50.

Having initially joined a weekly evening pottery class, she became a talented figurative ceramic sculptor, an activity into which she would surely have blossomed had illness not intervened.

Nicola separately survived leukaemia and lymphoma and the brutal treatment for those diseases, but succumbed to a rare autoimmune syndrome – a histiocytic disorder, which causes parts of the immune system normally active in fighting off invasive pathogens to turn on the body’s own healthy cells and destroy them.

Nicola was a vibrant, intelligent and thoughtful friend to many. She and I married shortly before her death, and she is survived by her brother, Timothy, and me.