As I wait for Louise Herron, the Opera House's CEO, to arrive for lunch at the Bennelong Restaurant, a toddler drops his ice-cream onto the tiles.

I wonder if she feels responsible for everything in the House from the Bennelong's tricky acoustics to the sticky patch where the ice-cream has melted.

"Is it a bit dirty down there?" wonders Herron when I ask.

As she talks, we spot a used condom stuck between the curved edges of the tiles next to the sticky patch.

"It does not look good, does it?" she says, when we realise the shiny thing is what we thought it was.

"Have you ever heard of an objectiphile?" she asks, moving on to other oddities of her job. "We occasionally have them here, and it is people who try to make love to the building."

Is the Opera House male or female?

"It just is," she replies. "It is a thing of great beauty."

"Look at that," she says pointing up at the curves of the Bennelong's ceiling. It provides a concentrated view of all the architectural elements that make up Jørn Utzon's masterpiece, including the shells, the cast concrete and the bronze.

"It is the Opera House in miniature," Ms Herron said.

Returning to the required clean-up job, she adds, "You just can't let these things distract you." But the mess will be discussed with building services that afternoon.

When Herron was first offered the job as Opera CEO, its first female boss, she was so excited that she could hardly sleep for the first year.

"It is very hard to switch off. Because this place is so full of potential and the more you think about it, it is completely addictive. It is a completely addictive job."

As caretaker of a building that really deserves the overused adjective "iconic", Herron describes running the House as a "massive enterprise."

"We have half a billion dollars' worth of building works going on, we have eight million visitors. We have 2000 shows, we have 1.5 million people who come to a show, and 350,000 who take a tour. It is worth $4.6 billion."

Herron barely pauses as she rattles off the list.

Her job includes making patrons and tourists feel welcome, liaising with seven resident arts companies, managing ballerinas and prima donnas, builders and plumbers, organising rock concerts and plays, overseeing a staff of technicians and artists, chefs and cleaners.

"The Opera House is a touchstone. We say it is the symbol of modern Australia, but it actually is," she says.

Inside the Bennelong, the lunchtime crowd is a mix of expensively-dressed local execs and tourists – a cruise ship is in port across the Quay. At the next table, an expensively-toned woman of a certain age in a long backless gold lame evening gown – at lunch! – runs her manicured fingers down her companion's back.

We are starting our lunch with some "single-origin bread and cultured butter" and chilled kambucha (a sweet vinegary tea popular with men with ridiculously long beards and top knots) when the Fairfax photographer Janie Barrett arrives.

"Don't make me look like a wanker," Herron says to Barrett.

People who know Herron say she isn't – although you could forgive her some hubris. She is the kind of person who makes the rest of us feel like slackers. She is a linguist who can speak French, German and Italian; she practiced law and was a partner with MinterEllison from 1989 to 2000; she was an arts administrator who was a non executive chair of Belvoir Street for more than 10 years and chair of the Major Performing Arts Board of the Australia Council. She has also advised companies on strategy as a banker and corporate advisor. With her husband Clark Butler, the CEO of Dun & Bradstreet, she set up Ironbark Corporate Advisory.

While some mothers help out at their children's canteen, Herron was a trustee on the board of Sydney Grammar when her two sons attended the Sydney private school that her father and uncle also attended.

Inside Peter Gilmore's new restaurant, the lunch service is hushed. When the music gets loud and the sound becomes uncomfortable because of the acoustics of the sails, Herron politely asks for the volume to come down a notch.

Herron eats there around once a week: more often than under its former management, she says tactfully, but she rejects any suggestion that it is her office canteen.

She is an enthusiastic spruiker of the menu. "Why don't you have the snapper? I will have the wagyu beef tartare because I feel like it," she says.

I take her advice and opt for the roasted snapper on a bed of orach, turnips, coastal greens and unami butter.

The carrot salad, which she chooses, is "really delicious." The bugs are fantastic, she says, but we decide against them that day.

When her wagyu beef comes, she goes to heaven on a mix of fermented chili paste, cultured cream and egg yolk. She is a tiny woman, slim thanks to daily swimming and yoga before work, with an enthusiastic appetite.

Did I want a taste? Yes, I say, and she surprises me by leaning over the table with a spoonful headed to my mouth.

The food is everything that she says. It is terrific.

Running the Opera House was the culmination of everything she had done, and a consequence of a decision (after nearly dying of septicemia) to only concentrate on things she loved.

"What Belvoir showed me was that all these skills you learn are completely adaptable … the skills as a lawyer, the rigour and the structure, and the same thing from being a corporate adviser. It teaches you a lot about communication and stakeholder management."

After overseeing the Opera House's 40th birthday in 2013, she is using these skills to manage the building's "decade of renewal." It is a program designed to preserve the house for future generations.

Related content: Robots on the roof of the Opera House?

It touches nearly everything inside and outside Jørn Utzon's celebration of architecture, from conserving the concrete structure to reimagining the vast and ugly space currently known as "under the steps".

The first stage was the opening last year of a new welcome centre, slightly to north of the Opera Kitchen and the Opera Bar on the lower level. It was partly in response to research showing many visitors came to see the Opera House, but were reluctant to enter it.

"There was a concern that there was a bit of a force field, which meant people were attracted to here but they weren't attracted to the inside."

She has also appointed the House's first director of visitor experience, Jade McKellar, a marine biologist who ran the aquarium. The new welcome centre is designed to get more visitors to go inside the building and take a tour, and complements other plans to upgrade all entries and foyers to the House. It is also is the first time the House has had a museum of sorts, documenting the building's famous and controversial history that began with an international design contest. She also appointed a new head of contemporary performing arts, reflecting a push to attract younger patrons with outdoor concerts.

Other projects – about $202 million of which has been funded already by the NSW government – include backstage improvements to the old stage machinery in the Joan Sutherland Theatre, and a new function centre to replace the marquee at the north of the building, which Premier Mike Baird described as having one of the world's best views of Sydney Harbour, and a creative learning project in the ground floor of the north of the house (next to the drama theatre).

She is more than halfway through her five-year term, and at 57, is still learning and taking on new challenges.

Only that morning she had met with her mentor, an executive with McKinsey and Co., to identify her personal and professional goals for the next year.

As the first female CEO of the Opera House, she says she is now enjoying the freedom of blokedom: the freedom to concentrate on work.

"We do, I think, as women tend to choose more typical nurturing roles, and I did and I loved it," Herron said. But more needed to be done to support women when children are young.

"The boys loved it when I was at Grammar, and when I was at Belvoir," she said. "And I think it is a fantastic role model for them, for young people, to see women straddling a whole lot of different things." At that stage of their lives, though, she tried not to go out at night so she could stay home with them.

"There's the first stage when you are the same as blokes – pre children – and then there's the stage when you are not.

But from 50 or so you are the same."

"It's just being a bloke. It's fantastic. It's easy. I go to work, I come home and my sons cook me dinner. "

Life and times

Born 1959 in Brisbane. Educated in Brisbane and Switzerland 
1975 – Moves to Melbourne, attends Merton Hall
1981 – Completes BA LLB at Sydney University
1986 – Completes LLM at University of London
1990 – First son Dougal Robinson born
1993 – Second son Finlay Robinson born 
1989-2000: Partner MinterEllison 
2002-2012: Chair of Belvoir Street Theatre, and, later, chair of the Australia Council's Australian Major Performing Arts Group
2007: Established corporate consultancy, Ironbark Corporate Advisory, with husband, Clark Butler
2012: Appointed CEO of the Opera House, the seventh CEO and the first woman
2013: Led the Opera House's 40th birthday celebrations 
​2014: Commenced the Opera House renewal project