Global Impact | Travel + Leisure

Amanda Levete
London

BACKSTORY One half of the radical husband-and-wife architecture team Future Systems, which is best known for the Natwest Media Centre, the press box at the Marylebone Cricket Club, a.k.a. Lord's. Part TV screen, part all-seeing eye, the center sits high above the playing field—and smack in the middle of mock-Tudor England. SIGNATURE STYLE With her husband, Czech-born Jan Kaplicky, Levete has designed stores for Comme des Garçons (in New York and Tokyo) and Wild at Heart (Notting Hill's couture florist), as well as the Birmingham outpost of Selfridges, a more democratic Harrods. Influenced by everything from snakeskin to chameleons to a windowless 16th-century Neapolitan church, the pair decided on thousands of circular, light-reflecting aluminum discs for the Selfridges façade. "Birmingham has been scarred by roads and cars; we wanted something that is a bit of a jewel." HANGOUTS Costas, in London, for the fish-and-chips (the place hasn't been touched since the fifties) and the 18th-century Orangery, next to Kensington Palace. FAVORITE PLACE "Prague—you find extraordinary architecture from the thirties next to Baroque buildings."



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