she`s so skirt!

Gretchen Lambert designs a dream career.

“I used to ‘cheat’ on guidance testing in middle school so that the result would tell me I should be an architect,” Gretchen says. She’s wanted to be an architect since third grade.  Now she is—plus she’s married to an architect (“we don’t work together”) and has opened Studio 2LR with two friends. “Our firm has been growing steadily. We have eight full-time employees; five are women.” Architects, she says, need to be good at design and at business.  “I take my responsibilities very seriously.  When a client trusts you to be a good steward of their money, their image, the functionality of their business, you can’t make mistakes.”  For Gretchen, travel to see great architecture in its environment is essential.  One lesson she carries forward from design school:  look at the every day in a different light.  “One of our professors during our study abroad felt that we were all missing the boat because we hadn’t thought to draw cross sections of our food in each country we visited.”