Alan Hajek's house is halfway uphill, and within earshot of the gondolas floating past on the new $20 million Arthurs Seat Eagle ride at Dromana, which opened to the public on Saturday.

The ride is so close to the house, you could hear passengers discussing their wife's infidelities or their uncle's jail time.

In fact, says Professor Hajek, who grew up here when the chairlift ran overhead in the 1960s and 1970s and still uses it as a holiday house, most overheard conversations were more banal.

Of the "Wow, what a view" variety, with the odd wave or a "hello" from above.

Professor Hajek's  father, engineer Dr Vladimir Hajek, built the Arthurs Seat Chairlift in 1960 and moved his wife, Alena, and baby Alan to a new house beside it in 1962 to keep an eye on it.

Alan remembers Dr Hajek yelling at boys for bouncing on their chairlift chairs.

And because passengers who boarded at the bottom paid at the top of the ride, they would often risk death or injury to jump off early to avoid the 20¢ fee.

Passengers then, and now, could peer into the Hajeks' split-level timber home where Alan's mother lived until in 2000.

Professor Hajek, now a philosophy professor at ANU in Canberra, says his family "were so used to it [being on view] that we didn't think much about it" although they didn't strut around naked.

He said the view of Dromana beach is "sensational", and aside from wheezes from the pulleys and "boppity bop" of the chairs going over pylons, the chairlift gave little noise.

It has been 10 years since the chairlift was closed and demolished after incidents including a collapse in 2003 that injured 18 and stranded 50 people.

And now the Hajek house – so groovy it featured in Home Beautiful magazine in 1966, and which tenants occupy during the year – has a ride running past again.

Professor Hajek says the chairlift was his father's pride and joy, giving him purpose and peace after escaping communist Czechoslovakia, where he was imprisoned for opposing the regime. He would gaze at the bay and say "if the communists came to Australia we could always escape by boat".

Alan said Vladimir, who died in 1976, would love the new ride, a slick Swiss-built machine whose cables and 24 gondolas, each seating eight people, are almost completely silent.

"It continues my father's legacy. He was a man of vision, so I feel like his vision continues."

Keith Billing, 74, of Wattle Glen, paid $3600 at a charity auction for himself, wife Marilyn and six relatives and neighbours to be the first to officially ride the Eagle after the Queen (aka comedian Gerry Connolly) cut the ribbon to open it.

The Arthurs Seat Eagle will be open 364 days a year, and be closed Christmas Day.