Modernist classic still in its element.

It was not simply the architecture. It was the setting, the garden, the outlook and the unusual relationship between them. The owner happened to be outside playing with her granddaughter, spotted Roger and invited him in. Her husband introduced him to the house.

“I called Judi and she met me there. It was a very different house, garden and outlook to anything we had seen previously. It was quietly, graciously a home we wanted to live in, unreservedly and we agreed to buy it”.

More than 25 years later, the house remains remarkably intact in spirit. Designed by modernist architect Nino Sydney as a Beachcomber Mk2, it belongs to a particular chapter of Australian architecture in which the house was not imposed upon its site so much as carefully positioned within it.

Here, the architecture seems to hover above the sandstone escarpment, overlooking the densely vegetated valley of Gore Creek Reserve. Very few neighbouring homes are visible. Instead, the outlook is overwhelmingly green.

Roger says. “It is precisely the siting which Nino Sydney envisaged for his Beachcomber design.”

The Apte family inherited some of Sydney’s original signed drawings, from the home's first owners. They offer a tangible connection to the architect's original thinking, but it is perhaps the continued relevance of the design that makes the house most compelling.

“This is our tree house, our peaceful, green escape, floating above the landscape,” Roger says. “It is fulfilling daily its original design brief.”

Yet it is the landscape that seems to have left the deepest impression on Roger, himself a renowned sculptor.

His connection with the Beachcomber began long before River Road. At 12, he visited the Beachcomber show home in Carlingford with his parents. The experience stayed with him.

“Their comments at the time firmly set in my appreciation the Beachcomber design’s sense of spaces, forms and function,” he says. “These precepts, being clothed by observation, education and working in interior design and building remain core elements of my design approach.”

Living in this particular design has extended that relationship between architecture and making. The bushland surrounding the house has become a kind of ongoing studio of observation: its textures, colours, forms and rhythms continually revealing themselves.

As a sculptor, Roger has found inspiration not only in the architecture but in the natural world immediately beyond it.

“The materials of the bush itself, the local bushwalks and the garden’s flora, fauna, the creek and waterfall all reinforce my joy, from childhood onwards, of the instruction of nature’s forms, textures and colours,” he says.

There is something wonderfully tactile about the way he describes the garden. A rock turned over reveals a leaf-tailed gecko. King Parrots noisily compete with lorikeets on the deck. A Water Dragon appears in the pool.

The carport, too, became part of the creative life of the house. For several years it served as Roger’s studio, later becoming a place for creating smaller sculptures even after work on larger pieces moved to other accommodation. Judi and Roger’s office occupied the lower level, with the garden and pool providing its outlook.

The distinction between house, studio and landscape consequently became blurred. The home was not simply somewhere to return to after making; it became part of the making itself.

For Roger, the history accumulated over more than two decades are less about individual occasions than the atmosphere the house has created.

“The sum of my special memories of this house is a sense of daily appreciation and thanks for the richness it has afforded us.”

That richness extends beyond the property itself. Greenwich has provided a community connected by art, recreation, the harbour and its bushland. The annual Local Artists Trail and the Greenwich Games bring residents together, while the surrounding walking tracks connect the suburb to its shoreline and natural landscape.

For a sculptor, it is an unusually fitting place to have spent 26 years.

View the listing: 117A River Road, Greenwich