Eltham's one of a kind Kevin Borland-designed Rice House for sale

In the mid-1950s when Tanya Parker’s kindergarten teacher asked her to draw a house, the pre-schooler depicted her family home on a bushy hill above Eltham township. “It was a lumpy drawing,” she remembers.

Slightly aghast, the teacher opined: “That’s not a house!”

Certainly, the building that Parker’s parents, potter Harrie and his wife Lorna Rice, had commissioned from mid-century Melbourne architect Kevin Borland, and that was the first commercial construction by the bush builder Alistair Knox, was comparable to nothing in Victoria at the time.

Comprising two separate structures, one with four lumps containing kitchen, living, dining and master bedroom, and the other with two lumps housing a self-contained children’s flat for Tanya and her brother Bela, The Rice House is unique as a structure formed of catenary or self-supporting arches, that it is heritage-listed as of significance to the state and rightly famous amongst Melbourne’s architectural fraternity.

Having spent their lives there until Harrie and later Lorna Rice died, the house is going on the open market and, according to her parents’ wishes, Mrs Parker is hoping “the extremely experimental building” will be bought by someone who will love it and restore it with due respect. “I want to do the right thing by the house.”

She has specifically asked her agents, Eltham’s Morrison Kleeman, to deter developers from jumping on the 0.4 hectare bushland “and destroying its integrity by cramming it. I hope that whoever gets it will reinstate it”. She also hopes the draped concrete canopy that once connected the two buildings will be reconstructed.

In buildings that have been compared to a sequence of concrete caves, “or concrete igloos, or Nissan huts”, the construction that required wooden arches to be overlaid with hessian that was then coated in three layers of concrete, was so hand-made that Mrs Parker reckons you can still see the slight knee dents the builders left in the roofline as they worked.

“I spent a lot of time on that roof”, she says.

“There is something very organic and very primal about the house. It’s got provenance and was a place that was always full of intellectuals and academics. My father was so thrilled with it that he literally never wanted to leave it, even towards the end of his life in 2009 when he was very ill.”

Mrs Parker reckons that with the requisite restoration of the interiors, there is scope to extend to the rear without impacting too much on the undulating profiles, or on the family of magpies that were tamed by the late Mrs Rice and that continue to do duty as the formal meeters and tweeters of contemporary visitors.