Robin Boyd Blott house in Chirnside Park for sale amid fears it is endangered

Danger and opportunity are hand in glove companions whenever a Robin Boyd house hits the market.

Due for auction on March 25 is the Blott House that both the selling agent and the director of the Robin Boyd Foundation regard as “one of the most original and best maintained” Boyd houses they’ve ever seen.

Tony Lee from the Boyd Foundation compares the high and dynamically-angled profile it makes on a ridge in Chirnside Park to “a stealth bomber”.

“The shape,” he says, “is Boyd responding to the site and maximising the quite extraordinary north views towards Healesville, the Yarra Valley and the Great Diving Range.”

Although he admits there “is not much written about this house, Boyd designed it in 1956 for a childless couple, Dr Stanley Blott and his wife and he is… experimenting with Stegbar window walls that Boyd had helped develop”.

That the three bedroom house with the double-decker living rooms sits on such a large (1965-square metre) parcel of land that originally presided over open paddocks — but is now embedded in ’70s and ’80s style suburbia – is where the danger arises.

Without any heritage protection Lee believes such “a big block, and the fact that the house is plonked right in the middle of it, will make it hard to retain” if it sells to a developer.

For Jellis Craig Hawthorn agent Belinda Anderson, the Blott House will be the 11th Boyd house she has represented in the past two decades.

In the beginning, she tells “the first house I sold in Studley Park had little appeal. No-one seemed to love these houses.

“But now that people realise how Boyd was at the forefront of modernism, any Boyd sale now attract five to 10 times more people than most other houses. Whether those people are there to buy or are there to educate themselves I can’t tell”.

In her past two Boyd sales, one for a 1951 house on The Boulevard in Ivanhoe that went for $1.74 million, “masses and masses of people went through”.

The Arnold House in Warrandyte, much in need of remediation, went for $935,000 in 2015 and was purchased by a city buyer who remembered liking the house when as a child she went there for piano lessons.

As these price differentials indicate, Anderson says “it’s very difficult to price a Boyd. Some go for premium prices, some don’t”. The Blott house is being quoted from $1.2 million.

“But this is a late and unusual Boyd that is bigger than most of the houses he did – perhaps because it was outside of the city,” says Anderson. “It is also one of the best maintained that I have ever seen. Apart from replacing the bathroom and putting a new stove and dishwasher into the kitchen, very little has been done to it.”

With Boyd having only designed about 200 houses and very few of those in the countryside, the Blott House represents another moment when true aficionados must collectively hold their breaths to see if it will survive a change of ownership.

Ideally it should. “And of course,” says Tony Lee, ideally, “it should be heritage listed“.