One idle moment during his upbringing in South Yorkshire, a 12-year-old Marek Reichman sketched his first car. It was the first of his many professional epiphanies achieved far ahead of his time. About a quarter of a century later, during a spell working at Ford in California, Reichman presented a first sketch to then Aston Martin CEO Ulrich Bez: his vision of how the original two-door DB5 might plausibly be stretched to make a four-door version.

In the years, just shy of fifteen of them, that have passed since, Reichman has transformed the visual language of Aston Martin and made the marque the most aspirational of our times. We tap into the mindset of one of luxury’s foremost game-changers.

From the start I wanted to make our cars more powerful looking, more muscular. I felt that the DB9 in its earliest form was very feline and didn’t represent the car’s natural powers and capacities, especially as we were just starting to go into racing again with the DBR9. When you see a racehorse at rest, it’s elegant and strong, but you don’t see the sinews of its muscles. The Rapide—its haunches, the lamps, everything—is powerfully graceful, in the way that a racehorse is when it’s galloping. Also, when you have a longer wheelbase you can better show the golden ratio.

When you look at natural athletes—Carl Lewis or [Magic] Johnson—they’re not over-bulked, yet they look ultra-capable. You see that in nature, too, and I wanted to represent nature in AM’s body forms. We’re not overt – we’ll leave that to Maserati and Ferrari. We prefer to be slightly understated and elegant.

Our biggest capability is that we have defined and designed the platform, the architecture, the layout ourselves. It’s not a VW Audi or a BMW in the case of Rolls Royce. We were unconstrained by an existing platform and could therefore place everything where it needed to be. That means you can play with mass and size. The DBX is something of a TARDIS—people see it and think it’s quite compact, but you can fit half a basketball team in it, and yet it’s got the biggest trunk volume in its class and also has knee room, shoulder room and head room.

We had to achieve muscularity and practicality, both uncompromisingly. We don’t compromise beauty for usability or vice versa. To use an athletics analogy again, while our sports cars are clearly sprinters and the GTE is a long- distance runner, the DBX is a heptathlon or a decathlon—really good at everything it has to do. I’d compare it to Olympic gold medalist Jess Ennis—an SUV has be supreme at so many things.

If I could do a survey of everyone on the planet—“Does anyone find a wave ugly?”, “Does anyone find a Nautilus shell ugly?”—not a single person could justifiably say “I do not like it because it does not look good.” Our brains are geared by two billion years of evolution to be a part of that mathematical equation and to appreciate that beauty. That phrase is about choice, which is something very different, something which came about through the philosophy of the Theologians, the Greeks and the Romans.

From light punk to very traditional to a mixture of the two, being able to have choice, and therefore more things colliding together, is a new cultural revolution. I teach millennials at Tongji University in Shanghai twice a term, and without a doubt that collision is exactly what new millennial thinkers expect, and that is why we’re doing an SUV despite it pushing against some of our traditional customers.

Any time we get to move the paradigm it’s a positive thing. With around 75 percent of the 70 million cars or so that the world makes annually, the design language comes straight from the horse-drawn carriage: the horse was the engine, the trunk was at the back. So any opportunity, as a designer, to get rid of that and have a flat floor with batteries and tiny motors in it—that, for me, is manna from heaven. The entire idea of community and collaboration within the cabin becomes a very different thing. These paradigm shifts in technology and therefore functionality and therefore form are really fascinating for me.

There are murmurs. In this whole world of luxury, how quickly we can shift from being on terra firma to being up in the skies, but not on a plane or in a helicopter, is something we can expect to be focused on. I’m a massive believer in sci-fi showing us the possibilities. As Einstein said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”