Amara Okonkwo

Amara trained as an architect in Lagos and spent her first three years drawing residential floor plans, which taught her a great deal about how people actually move through a space and very little about what she wanted to do with her life. The realisation arrived on a delayed holiday in the Alentejo, where she found herself redrawing a friend’s badly planned week on the back of a menu — and enjoying it more than anything she had built that year.

She moved to Lisbon and spent six years with a design house there before joining Axplorers in 2019. She came in to work on Iberian routes and stayed to shape how the whole studio thinks about pacing. The now-standard rule that no itinerary leaves the desk with more than one fixed commitment a day is hers, argued for over most of a winter and adopted after a client wrote to say it was the first holiday she had returned from rested.

Six years on, she designs the studio’s founding itineraries — the first journey with a new client, the one that sets the tone for everything after. She asks what time you like to wake up before she asks where you want to go, and she will spend a full call on the question of which three mornings of your week actually matter. Colleagues have learned not to send her a draft with a packed Tuesday.