Architect Sean Godsell's childhood home included in Robin Boyd Foundation open house tour

The Godsell house in Beaumaris.

"We lived in the weird house," says MPavilion architect Sean Godsell. "There was nothing really like it." The house designed by his father David in 1960 brought mid-west Americana to Beaumaris. A devotee of Frank Lloyd Wright, the elder Godsell translated Wright's vision of an ideal American suburban house to Melbourne's bayside.

The Beaumaris of the 1950s and '60s was itself an idyll suggesting what a bright suburban future might be, says Professor Philip Goad, who also grew up in the beachside suburb. "You had everything. The great modern house in a bush landscape, but you were still in the suburbs and near the beach. It was like 'holiday modern', but in the suburbs. It was one of those few suburbs where people were prepared to experiment."

For David Godsell that experimentation extended to Wright's Usonian homes, with their flat planes, projecting eaves and strong link between interiors and exteriors. From the street, Godsell's Beaumaris house is immediately defined by its cantilevered carport roof terracing down a slope. Designed as an everyman house there's a humility of scale, says Goad. "It's spatially and technologically lean and that's what Sean's work is as well. They're not about excess."

Athan House 1986-88 (Monbulk), one of Sean Godsell's favourite houses, will be open on November 30.

Architects are often reluctant to declare their influences and reveal the buildings that inspire them. It's too difficult. Centuries of architectural history offer so many references. Sean Godsell the architect responsible for such high-profile public buildings as the RMIT Design Hub has chosen six local influences for the latest Robin Boyd Foundation open house tour, including his family home.

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"I grew up in a house where the discussion was always architecture," says Godsell. "That exposure to architecture did two things. It made me want to do it. But it also made me query what it was at a certain critical point. That's where the work of architects like Robinson Chen were interesting. They were well-detailed, well-constructed buildings, but spatially in the sense of their materiality it's fundamentally different from what I only knew growing up."

For anyone familiar with Godsell's mature rational buildings and exploration of materiality, his choice of mid-century buildings will seem unsurprising. An admirer of clarity in architecture "It's a combination of skill and restraint" he's chosen Peter McIntyre's Snelleman house (1953), which snakes down a sloping site around a giant tree. "It's an interesting way to handle a very difficult site with a strong idea."

Several buildings reveal Godsell's interest in the experimentation between public and that most private of buildings, an architect's home. In the square, fortress-like exterior of Roy Grounds Hill house (1953) and its circular central courtyard we see the experimentation for the National Gallery of Victoria. Meanwhile Philip Goad sees in Robin Boyd's Walsh Street house (1958) and its suspended cable roof, evidence of the experimentation at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.

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Architect Sean Godsell's childhood home included in Robin Boyd Foundation open house tour