"What you get is this beautiful ability to go right up to the facade.
"Something I've always loved about Wellington Airport is that you can sit in the lounge and look out at the apron and look out to the south coast," says Skipper.
"You have this real immediacy with what's going on.
"And I've always really liked planes."
The intellectual challenge of designing and constructing a building while the airport hums with arrivals and departures encapsulates the things that drew Skipper to architecture.
"Even as a teenager I knew that I wanted to have a career which would follow me through everything I wanted to do in terms of having a family and in terms of my life.
"For me architecture ticked all those boxes because you have to be analytical, you have to be very details orientated, you have to be very creative, and it is a career that can expand and contract as it needs to, to accommodate having a family."
Being able to handle multi-faceted projects with demanding deadlines, and still maintain creativity, was put to the test when Skipper had her first child, Claudia, part-way through her architecture degree.
She took a six-month break from study before returning to complete her degree while working part time at Warren and Mahoney.
Skipper says she looks back now and wonders how she did it, but having a baby forced her to take responsibility and set the foundation of skills for her career as an architect.
It's not just about time management but also collaboration, she says.
"I mean that in a professional sense and at home as well.
"It's absolutely vital to all the projects that I do, particularly complex ones, that you get on board with your clients and with your other consultants really early on so that you can manage a great working relationship with them."
Skipper says her architecture career has followed a convoluted path. "At any given point I've made the decision to do what is right for me and really owned that."
Having worked for Warren and Mahoney for several years after graduation, she made the call to go out on her own.
Initially working from home, she says it was a decision based on wanting to experience the immediacy of being at the coalface - fronting up to clients, setting fees and working directly with contractors - opportunities that typically don't happen until later in your career in a larger firm.
"It was a conscious choice that actually I need to do something different.
"I don't think I was even looking holistically at my career analytically; it was just a feeling that I needed to do that." Having her own practice also limited the impact on her work-life when daughters Phoebe, now 11, and Amy, nearly 10, came along.
"The only thing that it probably did is meant that I stayed working for myself for a little bit longer, but I never felt hindered.
"It was interesting - it felt like a liberation in a way.
"I don't want to make it sound easy - it was really hard - and lots of working during the day and then working at night when they'd all gone to bed and then tag-team at the weekend, that kind of stuff, but how great to be able to pick up your kids at 3pm and not have anybody telling you you can't.
"So for me a career in architecture has really enabled me to be a professional mum." Late in 2012 she returned to Warren and Mahoney, seeking the challenge of the big builds on offer at a large practice.
"The time was right in terms of my children and the time was right for me in terms of my career to get back into those complex projects." Skipper says she wonders if coping with a newborn while studying and working without having the option to pull an all-nighter honed her ability to make everything fit into its place.
"I think that's a real blessing that I learnt that at that stage and I do that now.
"For me it's really important that the people I work with - clients, contractors and people in the office - know I'm a mother.
"I don't expect it to affect my work at all but I really believe strongly that being a mother or a father is so important and is not something to be hidden away. It's not like you can't be a professional just because you're a parent."
