Down Albert Street in Edgecliff, set back behind a brick driveway and a walled garden, sits “Fenton” — the house Robin Dods designed for himself about 1918–1919. The allotment came out of the old Orielton Estate subdivision; Dods took the largest of four lots and built what most people who care about Sydney domestic architecture still treat as his last major personal statement.
From the street it reads as a quiet Interwar Georgian / Colonial Revival villa: white rendered walls, sandstone plinth and dressings, deep green shutters, a steep terracotta-shingle roof, and a carefully ordered porch with leaded fanlight and sidelights. On the harbour (falling) side a lower storey opens behind a simple loggia — the sort of move that makes the house feel bigger once you are inside than the street elevation ever admits. Joinery and interior detailing survive to a high degree of integrity; the drawing room is often noted for maple panelling and plaster initials tied to the Dods household.
Fenton later passed in the family to Sir Lorimer Fenton Dods, the pioneering paediatrician. It remains privately owned and sits on the NSW State Heritage Register (item 00249), with an earlier Register of the National Estate listing as “Fenton and Garden.” Contemporaries including William Hardy Wilson admired it — and standing at the gate today you can still see why: restraint, proportion, and no need to shout.