The finished Champagne Poker campaign images look like the output of a shoot that moved between several venues. A mural wall. A gilt-framed drawing room. A Victorian bedroom. A balcony over the sea. In fact, every one of them came from a single brand photoshoot location in Margate: one hotel room and a staircase at The Albion Rooms, all within one booking.
That is the whole story, and it is worth telling properly, because it demonstrates something most location searches get wrong. People shortlist spaces by hunting for one hero backdrop. The Champagne Poker shoot shows that the better question is how many usable looks a single space can give you before anyone has to pack a bag.
Champagne Poker is an independent clothing brand based in Westgate-on-Sea, a few minutes along the coast from Margate. The label was founded after decades spent buying for and managing menswear stores across Kent and London, and it sits somewhere between streetwear and casual menswear. In other words, exactly the kind of small independent brand that needs campaign imagery which looks considered without a London production budget attached.
The shoot took place at The Albion Rooms, booked through Creator Spots. The space gave the team a ready-made setting with enough character to work on camera without bringing in a van full of set dressing.
The useful part of this case study is how differently the four setups read, given how little ground the shoot actually covered. Rather than changing locations, the team changed rooms, angles and light.
Look one: the mural wall. A painted mural gave the streetwear side of the range a bold, graphic setting. It reads urban rather than seaside, which is quite a trick for a building on the Eastern Esplanade.
Look two: the drawing room. Gold frames, dark walls and period furniture produced the most editorial of the four looks. This is the setting that would be genuinely expensive to fake. Prop-hiring your way to a convincing gilt interior costs more than most independent brands spend on an entire campaign.
Look three: the Victorian bedroom. A brass bed and the building’s gothic black-and-gold styling gave the range a moodier, more intimate lifestyle read. The finished photographs show how much visual depth a real, lived-in interior carries compared with a seamless paper backdrop. If you have read our piece on why real environments beat fake backdrops, this is that argument in campaign form.
Look four: the seafront balcony. Stepping outside the room brought natural light and the sea into frame, which gave the campaign an outdoor look without anyone travelling anywhere. During the Champagne Poker shoot, the balcony effectively functioned as a fifth wall of the same room.
In practice, the staircase and the transitional spaces between setups did quiet, unglamorous work too. Corridors, landings and stairs are usually treated as the bits you walk through carrying a tripod. Here, the staircase became part of the shoot. If you only ever assess a property by its hero room, you are ignoring half of what you are paying for.
The Albion Rooms is a Victorian townhouse on Margate’s seafront with a gothic black-and-gold aesthetic running through it: ornate chandeliers, leather furniture, bay windows over the sea, and seven individually designed hotel rooms, no two alike. The character is accumulated rather than styled, and that shows up on camera as texture and depth.
For anyone evaluating it for their own commercial shoot, the practical details matter as much as the look. Hire starts from £20 per hour, Monday to Saturday, 9am to 5pm, subject to availability. Bookings cover one space at a time, so if you want the bar as well as a hotel room, that is two bookings. Spaces are hired for photo and film shoots only, and an additional cleaning fee applies if bedding is used. Natural light comes courtesy of those bay windows in the bar and the hotel rooms.
It is not the right space for everything. If your brand needs clinical, minimal or brightly Scandinavian, this is the opposite of that, and you would be fighting the building the whole day. But for anything that wants atmosphere, period drama or a high-end editorial feel, you can check current prices and availability on the listing.
A few practical takeaways, none of which require a bigger budget. They mostly require walking around.
Count the looks before you book. When you view a listing, do not ask “is this room nice”. Ask “how many visually distinct setups can I get here”. Walls, windows, furniture groupings, stairs and outdoor corners all count. The Champagne Poker shoot got four campaign looks from a footprint most people would photograph once.
Treat transitional spaces as sets. Staircases, landings and doorways come free with the booking. They also tend to have the most interesting light in old buildings, because nobody designed them to be photographed.
Fewer moves means more shooting. Every location change on a shoot day eats time in packing, travel, parking and re-rigging. One space with four looks converts all of that dead time into frames. For small teams without an assistant to send ahead, that difference is the whole margin.
Real interiors do work styling cannot. A distinctive building gives you depth, imperfection and story in the background of every frame. That is precisely what separates a campaign image from a product photo, and it is the hardest thing to fake on a budget.
Margate has more genuinely characterful interiors per square mile than a town its size has any right to. The Albion Rooms is one of several spaces in the area hireable by the hour, and if it is not the right fit for your brand, our guide to the best content creator spaces in Margate walks through the alternatives, from a 1950s diner booth to a private gym with a graffiti wall. Margate’s wider creative credentials are well documented by Visit Thanet if you are travelling in and making a day of it.
Booking works the same way everywhere on Creator Spots: hourly hire, clear prices, no fees for creators. If you have not used the platform before, how it works for creators covers the whole process in about two minutes.
Champagne Poker walked out of one Margate booking with a full campaign. The room is still there, the staircase is still there, and the light over the sea does not charge extra. Browse spots in Thanet and see what your version looks like.
Details last checked: August 2026.