Diana Melichar owns Melichar Associates, an architectural firm in Lake Forest.
Q. Why did you choose architecture as a profession?
A. Growing up I was pretty much good at every subject but I always liked math and art. My dad worked for IBM. He had a love of architecture. We moved from house to house and every house, we were always renovating it. I spent a lot of time painting walls and tackling wiring and working with my dad.
Q. Your firm handles everything from houses to banks to Metra stations. Which is most complicated?
A. Each project is challenging in its own way. The residential projects are usually more intimate relationships with the client and education and hand-holding. A commercial project, there might be extra technical components but less emotion involved.
Q. Do you ever get any unusual requests from clients?
A. We had one guy in Northbrook who wanted a firing range underneath his house. That was denied by the city. We did a house in Hinsdale where we designed a seven-car parking garage in a tight space under the house. We get secret panels and secret doors and places to hide things and stash things.
Q. Does your firm do much work on historic houses?
A. That’s one of our specialties.
Q. What are the challenges of that?
A. That goal is to have the characteristics of a historic home but upgrade to current living standards.
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Q. What type of home do you live in?
A. I live in a 1960s Colonial. If I could design my own home, it would be hard to know what to do. Some days I’d live in a modern, all glass house. Other days I’d like to live in a house from the 1700s.
Q. Has the profession of architect changed over your years in the field?
A. My first job was in 1982, when I worked in Libertyville for a summer. A general contractor walked in, saw me and walked to the receptionist – the only other woman in the office – and said, ‘My God, there’s a girl in the office.’ In my college architecture class there were only five (women).
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