Sir Terence ConranThe Zaha Hadid exhibition  Terence Conran has shaped the lifestyle of modern Britain. Born in 1931, he studied textiles at St Martins School of Art, opened Habitat in 1964 and created a worldwide group of more than 20 restaurants, eight Conran stores and the charitable Conran Foundation, which funds the Design Museum.  Zaha Hadid: Architecture + Design, at the Design Museum (www.designmuseum.org, until 25 November, marks the arrival of the world's most famous female architect. Her 'explosive' style is evident in buildings such as the BMW factory in Leipzig and an arts centre in Cincinnati. She is designing the aquatic centre for the 2012 London Olympics.  I first noticed Zaha Hadid's work about 20 years ago. The architectural profession has always been very much on her side, especially when she lost the Cardiff Opera House commission. For a while she was doing wonderful work that no one was building, so it's fantastic to see that she's now got over that terrible hump. Now Zaha is an enormous architect with masses of work.  In her work nothing ever seems to be at a right angle. It's intensely sculptural, and completely confounds what architect Jean Pouvre said: 'Never design anything that you don't know how to make' - it seems to me that Zaha has done exactly the opposite.  I find her full of imagination, although I wouldn't want her to design a house for me: I'm a plain, simple, practical guy. What I've done all my life is design and promote affordable things - the belief my generation had is that design can improve the quality of life for everybody. I'm too much of a Fabian purist to like furniture as art, which is what seems to be happening. In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties everyone wanted a sofa but didn't mind what it looked like. Now, unless it has the right aspirational qualities it won't be a success. People care desperately about the way things look, to the exclusion of how well they are made or the price.  I'm proud of Benchmark, my sustainable-furniture company. The workshops are in the grounds of my country house and we give school leavers apprenticeships - they all stick at it. I can make a drawing of a chair on Sunday and by Friday see the finished product. And if I need to solve a problem, I take a bath. I have an extremely bad back, and the only place I'm really comfortable is in a big hot tub, smoking a cigar, thinking.  · Benchmark Furniture is launching 18 new pieces at 201 Brompton Road, London SW3, from 3 to 30 September (01488 608 020; benchmark-furniture.com)  Kelly Hoppen is the interior designer whose minimalism earned her the epithet 'Queen of taupe'. She has offices in London, New York and Paris and created the British Airways first-class cabin and homeware for Bhs.  Covering 35,000 sq ft, Alfie's Antique Market opened in Marylebone's Church Street, London NW8 (www.alfiesantiques.com) in 1976. The wares of its multiple dealers reflect the current interior obsession with 20th-century furniture over older antiques.  I come here a lot. For individual pieces, you can't beat Alfie's. Look at that [a Sixties Vitosi chandelier composed of hundreds of bright green Murano glass disks] - it's sculpture. I don't want things that other people have got, and neither do my clients. I've been coming here for what feels like a million years - I grew up in Chelsea. It's a great place for gifts, too, and for crocodile vintage handbags.  My style is always moving on. If I stayed static, I'd be bored senseless. Being a designer is like being an actress, taking on a role. When I started working on a beach house outside Cairo recently I had just been on holiday in Greece, and I was thinking heat and dust. On holiday you're so different from what you're like in the city.  I spend a lot of time in London - the only thing uninspiring about it is the weather - but I love to travel. I found incredible things in LA. We're opening an office there. Yes, we did do the Beckhams' house. I don't talk about my clients, but she's told the world, so everyone knows.  The last thing I bought for myself here at Alfie's was a Murano glass owl and a papier mache hand-painted table. The owl moves around the house; it's in my dining room at the moment. My financial director said owls are good luck in the house. I totally fell for that. I love that sort of thing. I'm very spiritual.  · Kelly Hoppen Home is published by Jacqui Small on 6 September, priced £30  Born in Madrid in 1974, Jaime Hayon worked for seven years at Benetton, becoming head of design. In 2004 he went solo, winning plaudits with his controversial Mediterranean Digital Baroque exhibit, curvy bathroom designs, futuristic ceramics and 4.2m-high Pinocchione for mosaic company Bisazza.  Established in 1753, the British Museum (www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk) houses 13m objects spanning nearly 2m years of history, including the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone. The Great Court, designed by Norman Foster, opened in 2000.  I have only lived in London for a year. I got tired of the Barcelona good life. Here is tougher, more real - you see more misery. Like much of Spain, Barcelona is built on tourism, so there isn't the seriousness you need to do something international - something the Japanese, the Chinese, the Australians, the Danish will understand.  I don't have an office in London, I just have my sketchbook and places like this one. I consider this place my office. I think in London, and I make at my studios in Barcelona and Trieste. But soon I will have an atelier in Shoreditch.  This building is fantastic: it shows the splendour of the things inside. And it's free. I've made a donation before, but I owe them a lot of rent.  I'm interested right now in history. A part of history can start a theme, and get me into ideas. At the moment I'm interested in the kings of England. The other day I was drawing some furniture after a visit to the gallery with the Tudor portraits - in some of those paintings you could see furniture in the background.  There is something very passionate about this place. If you go to the Prado, if you look at a certain style of painting, you may only find two or three examples. Here you look for a theme from history, Romans, Assyrians, early Japanese crafts, whatever, and they have so much material - it must be the most amazing physical library in the world. To look in a book is one thing, but to see the real thing is better.  Sometimes you chance across something. The other day I saw a minimalistic chair that is probably medieval - those Bauhaus guys must have looked at them!  Many other people are inspired by process, by what the industry can offer you, but I'm quite classical in my choice of materials. I use ceramics, I work more like an artist. When I get influenced by a theme it's when the click starts, and I draw like mad - fantasy activates and solutions come up to you. Henry VIII - this guy was huge, so maybe we could make a lamp, Henry the lamp, with a switch for a nose.  Ideas come from the most unexpected places, and understanding this will get you to another level, another level of uniqueness. That's what creativity is about, making the unexpected. When I show something it might be shocking for people: they might not understand, but when there's no reaction it's not effective, it's banal. If you hate it I love it; if you love it I love it, too.  I know one day I won't be here. That gives me the most energy - it makes me think how much I can risk. Risk is equal to success: if you risk you get somewhere, if you never risk you get nowhere. One day you won't be here, so why not go mad while you are? Why not be positive? Learning by doing, breaking the rules. If one day I'm not like that, come and slap me.  As there are people who are interested in buying Pinocchione, maybe someone will buy it for the British Museum! That would be great, that one day they would put one piece of mine in this museum, somewhere in a little corner.  · The Hayon Vase Collection is at the Bisazza Showroom, 60 Sloane Avenue, London SW3, from 15-25 September  Sir Paul SmithSir John Soane's Museum  Born in 1946, Paul Smith is one of Britain's most famous, successful and idiosyncratic fashion designers. His 'classic with a twist' formula has grown into a business empire with a £100m annual turnover and 225 shops worldwide, including 200 in Japan.  Sir John Soane's Museum (www.soane.org is the former London home of the neo-classical architect (1753-1837). It consists of three town houses which he knocked together, and was bequeathed to the nation as a museum of architecture, though it is more like a cabinet of curiosities acquired during Soane's travels.  This place is an inspiring mixture of the traditional and the wildly eclectic, and thus fits my personality perfectly. Anyone who visits my shops or offices knows that I do business amidst a huge jumble of bits and pieces that I've garnered from all the corners of the globe. Like me, John Soane was a great traveller. He'd go off to Egypt and come back with a sarcophagus. I've just been to India for 24 hours and I came back with 15 wardrobes and six trunks. Soane needed three town houses for his collection. He added hinged walls for his paintings, and even a mezzanine floor to accommodate his scholars.  I came across the museum 20 years ago. I've always trawled through flea markets and taken ideas from things that are found and observed rather than from magazines or books or people's work. I love the ad hoc nature of the displays - objects are placed here and there as Soane carved out more spaces; there isn't this urge to contextualise in the way other museums feel obliged to. The objects are free to interact with the space and take on a life of their own.  Something I'm passionate about, which the Soane museum exemplifies, is individuality. Paul Smith itself is a brand, but I try to ensure that every shop is different. The Nottingham store is in an 18th-century town house, the new LA store is a giant pink rectangle, and you might have pop art or antique French chairs in either. As with the Soane, I want people to have that no-idea-what-they're-going-to-find feeling when they walk in. The juxtapositions can be funny as well as jarring; in the Soane they put a thistle on a chair if they don't want you to sit on it. I love those little lateral asides.  I always find something new when I come here. Today I noticed some squares of old painting on a wall that must have been covered by something when the wall was repainted, and now look really odd and patchworky. I'm thinking we could do some kind of patchwork shirt in a similar way, with bits we cover while the rest of the shirt is dyed, that then form this right-but-not-quite-right kind of contrast.  I find inspiration in everything; I just have these magpie eyes. I don't need to go into a design room or sit on a thinking step. I've always got bits of paper and pencils in my pocket so I can jot things down. This intuition, or whatever you want to call it, makes up for my lack of formal training as a designer and explains the continuity of my career. I can pick up on something and it'll go through some obscure mental process and turn into an idea for a suit or shirt, or fashion show or shop window, and I won't remember where it came from.  I'd like to bequeath my own version of the Soane Museum to the nation. I'm wondering what to do with my archive and all my stuff. It would be wonderful to have a space like this to show it all off, to give future generations an idea of what Paul Smith was all about; to hopefully inspire people in the way that Soane's singular vision continues to inspire me.  Margaret Howell is famous for her expertly constructed yet lived-in designs. She was born in 1946, attended Goldsmiths College, and opened her first menswear store in 1977. She now has three UK stores and another 56 in Japan. Recently she has been exploring British mid-20th century design, collaborating with Ercol and Anglepoise and supporting the Open House weekend.  The Laban Centre for contemporary dance in Deptford, south London (www.laban.org) was designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, who later won the Pritzker Prize for their Tate Modern. The building houses 13 dance studios and a 300-seat theatre, and it is known locally as the 'rainbow building' on account of its translucent covering, developed in collaboration with Michael Craig-Martin. In 2003 the £14m project won the RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture.  I thought the Laban Centre was really exciting when it was built. I live in Lewisham, just over the hill, and I used to walk around here a lot. I thought: how wonderful it must be to be a student and come here. I felt the building seemed apt for its purpose - its colours suggested a ballet dancer's tutu; it had a light feeling about it.  I love catching sight of it as you're going past on the train: you see dreary buildings and suddenly something very different and exciting.  Buildings can have an uplifting effect on one's education. I went to a new school - not only was it newly built in the late Fifties, it was also a co-ed bilateral school and signalled a new way of thinking. It was a fantastic building; they were chipping away at the reliefs in the wall when we enrolled. Sadly, it's now gone. It was in Surrey and had enormous playing fields.  The originality of this building is quite amazing. It's unusual that architects can build quite different-looking places - often an architect has a style that you can recognise.  I've visited the Tokyo store they designed for Prada. It had white carpet, which for a shop is quite decadent - I'm sure I'll do that in one of my stores. They have a big doormat now.  · Margaret Howell is hosting a talk, 'Architects' Houses From Bromley to Brick Lane', on 13 September at 34 Wigmore Street, London W1 (openhouse.org.uk)  · This article was amended on October 7 2007. We said interior designer Kelly Hoppen had created a homeware line for Debenhams. In fact, it was for Bhs. this has been corrected.
Paul Smith finds his inspiration in an eclectic museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Margaret Howell discovered hers in a dance centre in Deptford, while Jaime Hayon is so fond of the British Museum he's virtually moved in. To celebrate this month's London Design Festival we asked five top designers to reveal the places and spaces in the capital that motivate them most.