Nichols was a pioneering woman architect who, during a brief career in Philadelphia, designed that city's New Century Club (1891, demolished 1970s) for a women's group. Delaware's New Century Club played an active role in reforms of the day: creation of the Women's College in Newark, cafeterias and penny savings banks in schools, Christmas Seals (first in the nation, 1907), child labor laws, juvenile court, garbage wrapped for collection. Nichols's homelike, Colonial Revival three-story clubhouse of brick and pargetting has brick quoins, twin Palladian windows beside the front door, and a central dormer with a curved gable. The place served as a hospital during the flu epidemic of 1918. Plans survive at the Historical Society of Delaware for the building and later additions (1910, 1930, Brown and Whiteside).