They’ve grown extra-thick pelts, and prefer the winter sunshine to their specially heated dens. Zoo founder and owner Richard Tindale says he can sympathise with the majestic cats; he, too, gets grumpy when the mercury rises, preferring to stride about in the cold.

Unlike the tigers, though, Tindale has spent most of his life in Canberra. And although he regularly travels to Africa, Asia and South America, it’s the place he’ll always come back to.

More specifically, the zoo that he and his wife, Maureen, have built pretty much from the ground up, is what keeps him here.

They even live here, in an apartment close to their former family digs, once home to the couple and their six kids, now the luxury Jamala Lodge, a favourite with celebrities and other well-to-do folk who love the idea of sleeping and lounging just a pane of glass away from a tiger, bear or giraffe.

For the first time in many years the couple are empty-nesters - if you can call premises with at least 100 separate mammals, countless fish and birds "empty".

The now-much-lauded National Zoo and Aquarium is the result of a serious gamble the Tindales took as they set off on something of a second life 20 years ago.

Tindale was once one of Canberra’s property titans, a young real estate agent made good. As a teenager - he moved to Canberra with his family at the age of six - he had dreams of becoming a journalist, even taking a job as a copyboy at The Canberra Times when he finished school at 17. He didn’t make the cut for a cadetship that year, and so took a job in the public service instead, spending four years in the Department of Treasury before casting his eye further afield.

“I applied for a real estate job when I was 22, started selling, and then when I was 25 I took over running the company,” Tindale says.

“We were very small, we were the smallest agency in Canberra at that stage. It was called Reg Daly real estate, and it was just a little agency on the second floor of Hobart Place. Very nondescript.”

We’re sitting in Tindale’s equally nondescript office just off to the side of the Jamala entrance. Unlike the lodge itself - which, with its $2000-a-night accommodation packages, keeps the zoo up-and-running - the office is typically unflashy, much like Tindale himself. And, in keeping with this image, he sums up his property career in no more than a couple of sentences, really.

“There were two shareholders in and I became the third shareholder in it, and then I eventually bought out the other two, and sold those shares to all the senior people in the company at that time,” he says.

The firm merged with another, R.O. Wellsmore, and eventually became Independent Property Group, still one of Canberra’s biggest property and real estate companies.

“I stayed there effectively until 1994, and then decided that I wanted to do something different,” he says.

“I saw a lot of people in business who just got consumed, wanting to do more and more, whether it was building the business or build the profit or the assets.

"I just thought, there's something different to do, something more. So I sold up and Maureen and I travelled around a lot and tried to see the big cats in the wild. We went everywhere from Alaska to Patagonia to Nepal Mongolia, Siberia, Africa.

“We loved all animals but cats were my passion, and I realised that other than in Africa, most of the cats were going to get wiped out in the wild. So the original intention was to set up a big cat breeding facility for endangered species.”

Their plan - audacious even today - was to do that right here in Canberra. Tindale had begun talks with the then minister for tourism about a land grant for a large-scale cat-breeding program, when the site of the city’s former aquarium came onto the market. Nestled in urban bushland 15 minutes from the city centre, the enterprise had, by then, gone into receivership twice.

At the time, Tindale seemed tainted even by considering taking it over.

“Because it had gone broke twice, and I had no background in zoology, and I was a developer and a builder and a real estate person, that they thought I was buying this to develop into apartments,” he says, chuckling.

“Just dealing with the government here was very awkward for a period. Dealing with the zoo industry was very awkward, so for the first couple of years we got nothing other than a few emu chicks.”

Gradually, they began consulting with other zoos, bringing in the experts and building up some credibility. Local staff were trained, the site expanded and the initial three zookeepers eventually became 20.

“Most of those are home-grown,” he says, not to mention several of his children involved in running the place.

“The keepers come through the ranks as volunteers. We've got to see them for a period of time, worked with them before we've given them part-time work, and they're trained the way that we want them trained, and they're all here for the right reasons. It's a terrific base of staff.”

And, as we wander the paths past some of the enclosures, looking for a perfect photo set-up, Tindale’s admiration and deference to the staff - not to mention his awe of the animals - is evident.

“The whole concept of the zoo wasn't necessarily to give something back to Canberra because - I think we have, but I think that's more of a by-product,” he says.

“It was more that we wanted to do something for animals, and by doing that, we could create something that could be great for Canberra as far as education, as far as recreation and as far as tourism is concerned. We think that's a consequence of wanting to do something for the animals.”

He says it took a good five years before anyone started taking the zoo seriously. In the meantime, he, Maureen and their brood of animal-loving kids set about building a conservation community.

“We took on a lot of ex-circus animals, and no one else would take them on other than [South Coast zoo] Mogo,” he says.

“Once they've finished performing, they go from being an asset to a liability.”

He recalls, with a surprising amount of tenderness, how anxious he was when the first pair of circus bears arrived.

“The first night that the bears arrived, I slept down there with them because I was worried about them,” he says.

“I'd had advice on it, but everything we'd built here, every single thing, Maureen and I have designed and fitted out. We've used people to put the drawings on to paper, but we've given them the drawings first. So when you're starting to talk about dens, bear dens, you've got to make sure you get it right.”

In the early days, he stayed close to the circus animals and other newcomers as they settled in, even while he let the experts do their job.

“Now I don't worry about it - I know that whatever happens, they're well looked after,” he says.