Fabled surf filmmaker Jack McCoy lists his “jaw-dropping” beach house Paradise View by Stutchbury for a little over three-mill US!

If only these walls could talk etc.

Surfing’s most enduring filmmaker, certainly its tallest, the Los Angeles-born Jack McCoy, is selling his architect-designed Sydney home for around three-mill US.

McCoy, who is seventy-three and who’s been in rough health with an unspecified illness the past few years, bought the old Crackerbox House, those ugly, post-war joints made in the nineteen fifties, at 51 Trappers Way, Avalon Beach, in 1998.

Eight years later, McCoy and his wife Kelly hired the noted Australian architect Peter Stutchbury, famous for designing “structures so sensitive to their site they converse with the bush, the shore or the paddock surrounding them” to create what they would re-name Paradise View by Stutchbury.

Stutchbury is a classic sorta cat.

Six years ago, when The Australian interviewed him, the life-long surfer was living in a tent after a divorce.

Reluctant, at first, to expose his “very personal abode” to further publicity, Stutchbury agrees to a tour of the once vacant block where his tent rests on a 48 square metre wooden platform incorporating an en suite, a bedroom and a prefabricated kitchen that walls one side of a shaded veranda. “It makes you realise how little you need,” he says, boiling the kettle for mugs of tea.

His desire to pare back coincided with packing up the West Head house where he’d lived with his former wife, landscape architect Phoebe Pape and their three children. “As I was taking everything out and putting it in boxes I thought really and truly…” The pink bathtub that had stood in one of the tree-high pavilions he’d designed for his family now sits amid straggly acacias out front of the tent. Inside there’s a fridge, a single gas burner to cook on if it’s too wet for an open fire, a flat-screen TV on top of the chest of drawers in the bedroom, and an old shearer’s table where we sit.

Dressed in jeans and elastic-sided boots, his silver hair laps the collar of his pale blue shirt. Now 60, he no longer surfs regularly like he did in his younger days, camping along the coastline, but his casual style suits this place. “The only hassle with a tent is the flapping,” he says of the wind that gathers force, snapping at guy ropes under a darkening sky. Once the squall hits I’m wishing for a sweater. “You’re seeing it at its worst,” he apologises. “This is as confrontational as it gets.”

Back to McCoy’s joint, it was built on the wrong side of the northern beaches’ peninsula if you want to check the surf, it looks across the flat Pittwater side, boats, pretty sunsets, that sorta thing, but with its minimalist, floor-to-ceiling, feel the outdoors vibe, it’s easy to agree with the selling agent who calls it “jaw-dropping.”

Fairfax real estate page Domain noted the house had been visited by “some of surfing’s biggest names over the years, including Kelly Slater, Andy Irons and Joel Parkinson.”

McCoy’s been riding out the COVID thing up at Scott’s Head on the mid-north coast, five hours drive out of Sydney, where he has another joint.

Make an offer here.