Over the last year, Diane Maddex has quietly taken over one function of the South Coastal Village Volunteers’ communications after another: posting Facebook notifications, liaising with our website manager, and contributing to and now designing and producing the newsletter. Using her skills as a professional editor and publisher, Diane has been a volunteer extraordinaire, and we are fortunate that she chose to give her time to our Village

Diane and her husband, Robert, have been married for almost sixty years and have one daughter, Alison, and one grandson, Lucien, who live outside Philadelphia. Born in California but raised mostly in the Washington, D.C., area, she was graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. During her youth, Diane spent more than a year living in Ankara, Turkey, where her father was a federal government advisor, and later a half year in Rome, Italy. She attended Antioch College, then transferred to Northwestern University outside Chicago, where she studied journalism and English and received her B.A.

In 1968 Diane joined the staff of the National Trust for Historic Preservation—“the best thing that ever happened to me professionally,” she reflects. There she wrote about the preservation movement as managing editor of Preservation News and learned about architecture on the job. When she left to live for two years on the island of Saipan in the Mariana Islands for her husband’s work, Diane became the Micronesian correspondent for the Pacific Daily News of Guam. While on Saipan her first book, Historic Buildings of Washington, D.C., was published. Afterward she returned to the National Trust, where she cofounded and later served as director of the Trust’s new book publisher, the Preservation Press.

After a total of eighteen years with the National Trust, Diane in 1990 left to start Archetype Press, a book producer that developed and printed large-format illustrated books after contracting with trade and other publishers, among them Simon & Schuster, Abrams, and the Smithsonian. With five employees, the company developed book concepts, retained authors and photographers, and produced scores of titles over thirty-two years. Archetype Press specialized in coffee-table books on architecture, interior design, gardens, art, famous hotels, and historic places (including Nemours in Wilmington). Many were award-winning books, such as The Wright Style and Wright-Sized Houses, that were reprinted over many years.

Diane herself has written a dozen books, half of those on Frank Lloyd Wright. Others include Bungalow Nation, Sea Island, and Midwestern Modern: The Architecture of Alden B. Dow. For her services to the profession, in 1999 Diane was awarded honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects, its highest honor for nonarchitects. In another architectural capacity, she served as a lay member of the Design Review Board of Reston, Virginia.

After vacationing at the Delaware beaches for many years (beginning in Dewey Beach when Diane was about four) and owning several properties here, she and Robert moved in 2002 from Reston to Water’s Edge in Fenwick Island. There she became an HOA member and later president as well as a co-leader of Save Our Assawoman. The couple also worked on the Friends of the South Coastal Library’s annual Cottage Tour and in local politics. In 2009 Governor Jack Markell appointed her as a lay member of Delaware’s state optometry board.