“I like this place best. It’s close to nature and makes me feel at home,” says Kuizhang Guo, who is also known as Sam, as he sits by a fire left by his friends who had partied at his mansion, known as Windermere, the previous night.

The five-bedroom, five-bathroom house, is probably used by Guo’s friends more often than Guo himself, who travels around the world spending little time in Sydney. And yet the entrepreneur and property developer plans to hold onto the house and expand on it as he believes “Australia is the place closest to paradise”.

The 158-year-old home surrounded by magnificent gardens on 3500sq m was not on the ­market at the time when Guo was seeking to buy a home in Sydney.

“I was just looking around along the (Lane Cove) river and saw this house. I found the door was open so I went in and said hello. Then I asked the owner if he was selling. He said ‘no!’,” he laughs.

“I came back a few days later and asked again. He finally agreed to sell.”

Guo bought the home from Nick Langley, co-founder of fund manager Rare Infrastructure, and his wife Lorraine Tarabay. He found the house so meticulously crafted that he doesn’t intend to change anything and has retained almost everything, except for building a bed-stove, or kang in Chinese, in the sun room.

With stunning water views, the sun room is a perfect place to read, meditate and drink tea with friends.

“It is close to the sea and the water is quiet here. It’s a good combination of water view and hill view,” he says.

Guo imported furniture from China and other parts of Asia, like the antique closet in the study and the stuffed peacock in the main bedroom, giving the house an exotic dab of colour here and there.

“I am not interested in the modern stuff,” he says, pointing to the long robe he is wearing. “I love wearing this at home. You know how old it is? I got it from a 70-year-old man in Bhutan and he said this was from his grandfather!”

He also reminds people of his background in arts — he graduated from an arts academy in northern China — and never hides his love for nature, despite the fact that he made his fortune via commercial real estate business in China and still controls a Shenzhen-based company called Fashion Group.

He is also looking for real estate opportunities in Australia. “You can build the best house in the world, but you can never create the beauty of nature.”

Soon, he will be able to reflect his ideas about architecture in a separate guesthouse he plans to develop on the Hunters Hill site.

“The most important is to build one which can integrate with the surrounding nature here, without any modern elements and all built with stone and wood,” he says.

“The really good architecture is not to highlight the building itself, but to integrate it with the place around it, as if it was created by the nature itself.”

With his family scattered around the globe, Guo is the only one living in Windermere. But he is never alone here, already dubbed the “Chinese Gatsby” by his neighbours, shooting to prominence with his open-door, lavish parties. “Actually most of the (partygoers) I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he says.

“I will have a chat if I bump into someone interesting, but if I am busy I just leave them alone. People love to come because they feel at home here. What I often say to them is: you are the hosts and feel free to help yourself here.

“I believe at the end of the day money is not mine, the house is not mine. Since it’s not mine, it will only have value if people use it.”