How many professional artists do you think are currently living, working and exhibiting in Brighton? 50? 200? Perhaps as many as 400?

Well, double that figure, add the number you first thought of, and you will be a bit closer. This weekend the Brighton Festival opens. That delightfully unstuffy three-week cultural carnival is reason enough to visit the resort that somehow manages to be both the grandest and grungiest in Britain. But running alongside it is a brilliant project called Artists Open Houses. The name virtually says it all. For the next four weekends you can view and buy paintings, sculptures and craftwork in their creators' own homes. And, astonishingly, there are well over 1,000 artists from whom to choose.

The scheme has been running for more than 20 years, and is hugely popular. The Brighton-based painter Anneliese Clarke, who was one of the first to open her house to visitors, says that in one three-hour period a few years ago 900 people crossed her threshold. “It got so mad that I decided to remove my name from the brochure,” she says. “Even so, I still get 3,500 visitors over four weekends.”

What attracts them is as much sneaking a look inside the houses as the art itself. People are curious about what other people have done to their homes, especially in a town with as eclectic a stock of domestic architecture as Brighton boasts. And there's particular interest in how artists live and work. You expect something bohemian, and you often aren't disappointed. Usually, however, you can't get into artists' houses until they are dead and famous, and their homes converted into museums.

To snatch a glimpse of a working artist's studio can be immensely revealing. The environment - chaotic or ordered, calm or bustling - can speak volumes about the imaginative process going on inside the artist's mind. And those circumstantial details may just supply the vital key to understanding art that is otherwise enigmatic or even impenetrable. Besides which, in Brighton the artist will often be on hand to explain all - or maybe just to murmur Delphic riddles while handing out tea-cakes.

All the exhibiting houses are grouped into 14 walking trails, so it's easy to skip from one to another. Entry is free. And there are some really wacky things. One group of portrait painters has taken over a church in Preston Village and stacked the portraits on pews - like a congregation. Not surprisingly, their show is called MASS. By contrast, another exhibition is being held in a beach hut.

And in a class of her own is the artist Kate Jenkins. Her show, Cardigan in Bloom, comprises a garden in which everything - flowers, shrubs, even birds and bees - is knitted.

I wonder whether, one day, knitted horticulture will be as sought-after as the work of another artist obsessed by his garden. At Christie's on Tuesday, a Monet painting is expected to fetch a record £20 million at auction. So you never know. If your eye and judgment are good enough, a weekend of judicious buying in Brighton could provide a very tidy little nest-egg for your heirs.

www.aoh.org.uk

Explore What's On

• Listings