The sky is leaden and it is pouring with rain as I drive past the quaintly named Sea Bathing Hospital, then along the seafront towards the giant shed on the beach that is the Turner gallery. We’re in not-so-sunny Margate where an incoming tide of creative energy is steeping the town in art and contemporary culture. In drab late winter sadly it is mainly hiding indoors. By the time I reach Amy Exton’s house in Cliftonville I’m more than ready for a little colour. Amy opens the door and I come out of the rain – and into the blue. A bright and brilliant cobalt blue. It is like stepping from grey old Kansas into technicolour Oz. Oh my! As Dorothy might say.

The dazzle continues as we head out of the blue hallway and into the kitchen diner. On one side there is a black and white monochrome kitchen area, a sensible practical space, but on the other it’s definitely playtime. Kitsch, glam, and joyous, this is Acid House meets Hilda Ogden (except that Amy is far too young to be that familiar with the eponymous style queen). There are lions and tigers and leopards (not bears). Opposite the kitchen there’s a huge mural of a beach scene and on the adjacent wall and ceiling she has created and hand painted her unique and colourful designs.

Amy studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins before becoming a set designer for fashion and music videos in London. She has designed and decorated this house to be a location. Appealing as a set for photo shoots and videos, it is also a proper, functioning home. Amy explains: “I wanted to get into interiors and I lived with someone who had a location house in London – it was on a 1930s scheme, basically because they bought it from someone elderly and they hadn’t updated the decor, so it was all original.” She was able to experience how they let it out for fashion shoots and saw the potential for having a location house of her own. It tied in well with her growing knowledge of set design. “So I thought I’d marry the two together and have some fun with it.”

She started to look around for a house and made the move from London to Kent eighteen months ago. “I like the seaside and had thought about Margate,” she says. “And I even think I must have seen this place somewhere – it all stuck in my head and then a year later I came back down and it was still on the market.” Built in 1902, the house is a tall centre terrace; all the properties around it were once part of a hospital and are arranged in a horseshoe shape around a useful off-street parking area. Amy’s house was part of a children’s tuberculosis ward. “When you look at the top of the doors you can see safety glass,” Amy explains, pointing upwards to the top of the high door, where she has disguised the municipal looking glass with a delicate wooden screen. “It’s been changed around quite a bit, but it has lovely high ceilings.” Previously a rental property, the interior was bland and unloved when she moved in. A blank canvas. “Yeah, very beige,” she says. “Brown carpets everywhere. It was kind of gloomy. It is a naturally dark house, most of it is north facing. The colour makes it cosier.”

Amy confesses that some of the colourful cosiness has evolved because the building’s history has made the place seem a little creepy at times, something not helped by local tales. “Some neighbours told us they thought there was a ghost child here,” she remembers. “And then that night there was a lot of noise. It was coming from the roof, but we thought it was from all around us.” She pauses, smiling. “It turned out to be seagulls, but it freaked us out for a little while – I’m not superstitious, but I went extra colourful just in case.” Let’s hope that ghosts only like the gloom, and exorcism by paint is the answer. By that adage, absolutely no ghosts could live here.

No structural work was needed, but Amy knocked through the kitchen wall to the dining area and put in a new kitchen and bathrooms. The kitchen units are from Ikea. “They were the cheapest, and the most interesting of the ones I looked at.” Painted black, the grain of the veneer still shows through the paint and gives them a textured look. “IKEA units are all the same,” she adds, “so you can change the cupboard doors and put different handles on. Black and white work well with the rest of the scheme, but to be honest, not many shoots feature the kitchen.” The kitchen is possibly going to be put to use in another venture, as Amy would like to start running a supper club in the evenings with Annie Nicholl of Annie’s Larder. “The kitchen is an important space, as cooking is the main thing I like to do,” she says. They are starting with a Valentine’s evening this month.

A varied range of clients have already used the house and courtyard garden as a location. “I’ve been surprised at how well it’s gone so far,” she says. “It’s mainly fashion shoots and music videos – pop, rap, grunge. The pop people like the saturated colours, rap are darker and use smoke. Once when I got home, there was a man standing in the bath with a fish.” She laughs. “Apparently it was part of a grunge video.”

This is her home, but she always has to have an eye for the location spaces. As she explains, “it’s very bold, but you can always paint over it. I’ve learnt that you have to be big and bold. You have to make backgrounds that people can use. And you also have to be flexible. I’m happy for people to move things around, and I’ll have to keep changing them. Upstairs the lounge has been shot too much. It’s quite niche, so I need to keep rotating things around.”

She has sourced a good deal of her furnishings from Margate. “There’s some interesting things here. It’s quite junky and there’s a lot of mid-century stuff around the place.” The bright pink sofa came from the Yard in the Old Town. “It was from The Ivy club in London originally. I wanted the kitchen diner to have the table in a central position at first, but the sofa just had to go there, there was no other space where it would fit – and it looks OK.” If you didn’t know, you’d think the whole room was planned around the sofa, which belies an innate skill. “I kind of made it up as I went along,” she says. “It was all decorated in my head before I moved but now it’s all completely different. You have to feel the space and live in it.” Luck also has its part to play. “I couldn’t find a floor for this space for ages and I was just about to give up and choose something boring, when this suddenly came on the market.” We look down at the stripy floor. “It’s tiger bamboo – what could be better?”

Geometric shapes and bright colours feature in most of Amy’s designs and she has received some interior decorating commissions on the strength of it. “I decorated the loos of Radio Margate” she says. “I went mad in those toilets with shape and colour, the brief was that it should be somewhere where people could go in and take selfies. They wanted it bold and bright. But they said no leopard print. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed,” she pauses and grins, “but I love leopard print. Every room has it and I like painting it too.” The work went down well, leopard print and all.

The house is not quite finished and she is still tackling the landing and stairs. A Herculean task. “I’ve not enjoyed it – it’s so large. The preparation is key and I’ve run out of steam a bit,” she says. Even with the excellent help of her father, decorating the house has been arm achingly labour intensive and tiring, but it has given her an idea. “One of my next projects,” (there are many) “is to develop some patterns that can be made into wallpaper to sell.” This would also tie in with another business she has up-cycling and revamping reclaimed objects, statues and ornaments. Once sourced, she prepares them in a studio down the road that she shares with her fashion designer housemate and another friend, the illustrator Sprankenstein, who designed the mural outside on the courtyard wall. The ornaments are first primed and then spray painted with gloss. “It’s amazing how you can transform something so quickly,” she says. “I did the Elvis bust on the stairs yesterday. It was really dull to look at, so I sprayed it pink.”

There is, Amy admits, a lot of pink in the house. “I’m drawn to it in interiors; I don’t know why. Coral is really in at the moment. The sitting room is coral, but I painted the ceiling silver to lift the peachy look and stop it looking sticky.” The look is enhanced by some satin curtains that were bought on Ebay and, by happy chance, they perfectly match the walls.

A similar effect has been achieved with the curtains in the bedroom, where the background walls have been painted a deep teal colour. “I was worried when I painted this room, as it came out much darker than I thought it would, but now the furniture’s in, it looks okay.” Amy gestures towards two chests of drawers: one bubble gum pink and the other a bright canary yellow.

Back to pink in the bathroom, Amy has used ferns and evergreens to bring a slightly Victorian parlour overlay to the look. The bathroom is demure compared to the other rooms, but still ghost-scarer bright.

Upstairs on the landings and staircase we are saturated in vibrant pink and orange. “Pink has a weird effect when it is put next to orange,” says Amy, “especially when it’s in different lights. This part of the house is lighter, as it faces south and sunlight comes in through the windows. Some of the pink looks orange and the orange goes purple.”

As if to illustrate the effect, the sun starts to shine through the window. The rain has stopped and the sky is clearing. Suffused with sunlight now, the whole house seems to glow.

Amy’s amazing use of colour and vivacious design is an inspiration, an instant mood lift and a fitting and memorable experience. Viva Margate; here’s to an eclectic mix of sea air, busts of Elvis sprayed pink, a dash of leopard skin and a whole lot of fresh talent in town.