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Filoli

Filoli is a large house positioned in 16 acres of formal gardens which are surrounded by a 654-acre estate located in San Mateo County, California. Currently, in possession by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Filoli is always open for the public. The site earned recognition as one of California's historical landmarks and also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A Brief History Of Filoli Constructed between 1915 and 1917 for William Bowers Bourn II, owner of one of California's wealthiest gold mines and president of Spring Valley Water company, supplying fresh water to San Francisco, and his wife named Agnes Moody Bourn. In the year 1910, they both bought the Muckross House estate located on the small Muckross Peninsula between Muckross Lake and Lough Leane. However, they wanted a country place nearer to home. So they hired San Francisco Architect Willies Polk, who used a free Georgian style to build the large country house called Filoli today. Willies Polk had also previously designed Bourn's abodes, one located in Grass Valley and another situated on Webster Street in San Francisco. Between 1917-1922, the gardens of the building were laid by Polk's friend Bruce Porter, who was commissioned to work with the Bourns in making preparations for the structure's garden layouts. The horticulturist who designed the plantings and fixed the original color schemes was Isabella Worn. She supervised the gardens of the Mansion for 35 years. Features The large country house sets in 16 acres of gardens structured as a series of formally enclosed spaces framed within brown brick walls and clipped hedges, which open one from another. In the mansion, you will find lawns with natural plants and flowers, a reflecting pool and carriage house, a Chartres and Sunken garden. The structure has an outstanding style of the Anglo-American gardening culture which reintroduces the Italian formality pioneered by Edward Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll in British gardens during the end of the 19th century and exemplified by patterns of two American Landscape designers and gardeners, one named Charles Patt and the other Beatrix Farrand.

The gardens extend southeast of the mansion sloping up to the surface. The sunken garden is the first of the four main rooms, and it has a rectangular pool at the center which houses hardy and tropical water lilies flanked by twin panel lawns and two olive trees, within the hedge of clipped Japanese yew. The walled garden in the mansion contains a series of enclosed spaces, including the stained glass window design outlined in clipped box.

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