Filoli facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Filoli |
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Exterior of Filoli, used as the Carrington Mansion on the television series Dynasty
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| Location | 86 Cañada Road, Woodside, California |
| Built | 1915 |
| Built for | William Bowers Bourn II |
| Architect | Willis Polk |
| Architectural style(s) | Georgian Revival |
| Governing body | National Trust for Historic Preservation |
| Official name: Bourn-Roth Estate | |
| Designated | August 28, 1975 |
| Reference no. | 75000479 |
| Designated | February 8, 1977 |
| Reference no. | 907 |
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Filoli, also known as the Bourn-Roth Estate, is a beautiful country house with amazing gardens. It covers about 16 acres (6.5 hectares) of formal gardens and is surrounded by a larger 654-acre (265-hectare) estate. You can find it in Woodside, California, which is about 25 miles (40 km) south of San Francisco.
Filoli sits near the southern end of Crystal Springs Reservoir, on the eastern side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation owns Filoli, and it is open for everyone to visit. This special place is recognized as both a California Historical Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Contents
Filoli's Story
The Bourn Family Era
Filoli was built between 1915 and 1917 for a wealthy couple, William Bowers Bourn II and his wife, Agnes Moody Bourn. William Bourn owned one of California's richest gold mines. He also ran the Spring Valley Water Company, which supplied water to San Francisco.
The Bourns wanted a large country home closer to their main house in San Francisco. They hired Willis Polk, a famous San Francisco architect, to design it. Polk used a style called Georgian, but he added California touches like tiled roofs.
The beautiful gardens were planned between 1917 and 1922 by artist Bruce Porter and the Bourns. A horticulturist named Isabella Worn designed the plant arrangements and color schemes. She looked after the garden for 35 years!
The Bourns lived at Filoli from 1917 until 1936. The name "Filoli" is a special word made from the first two letters of William Bourn's life motto: "Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life."
The Roth Family Era
After William and Agnes Bourn passed away in 1936, their estate was sold. In 1937, Mr. William P. Roth and Mrs. Lurline Matson Roth bought it. Lurline Roth was an heiress to the Matson Navigation Company.
The Roth family added many new plants to Filoli's gardens. They especially loved camellias, rhododendrons, and azaleas, which you can see in the Woodland Garden. They also built the peaceful swimming pool and a charming screened-in teahouse.
Filoli Today
In 1975, Mrs. Roth gave the entire estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She also provided money to help pay for its yearly running costs. Now, Filoli is managed by a private, non-profit group called Filoli Center. It has its own team and many volunteers.
Filoli is very popular, attracting about 400,000 visitors each year. In 2023, something very important happened at Filoli. It hosted a meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. This meeting took place on November 15, 2023, during a big summit in San Francisco.
Because of this important meeting, many more people, especially from China and Chinese American communities, became interested in visiting Filoli. Its beautiful gardens and its appearance in the TV show Dynasty had already made it famous.
The Filoli House
The main house at Filoli is very large, with 56 rooms and covering over 54,000 square feet! It has grand rooms like a ballroom and a reception room. There are also cozier family rooms and areas where the servants lived.
When the National Trust took over, the house was empty. But over time, many of the original furniture pieces and artworks have been given back. This helps make the house look like it did when the Bourns lived there. This effort is still ongoing. For example, in 2022, the gentleman's lounge was updated with new furniture and a recreation of its original wallpaper.
Filoli Libraries
Filoli has two libraries filled with books and information about the families who lived there and the estate itself. The Friends Library is a lending library. It has about 1,500 books, 125 videos, lectures, and even copies of movies filmed at Filoli.
The Sterling Library is a research library. It holds 1,800 books and 40 journals. Both libraries are only open to Filoli members or people doing research.
Amazing Gardens
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Reflecting pool and former carriage house.
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The Chartres Garden
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The Sunken Garden
The 16 acres (6.5 hectares) of gardens are designed like a series of outdoor rooms. They are surrounded by brick walls and neatly trimmed hedges. As you walk through them, one area opens into the next, offering long, beautiful views.
The gardens mix wild-looking plants with neat lawns, brick paths, and gravel paths. You'll see formal reflecting pools framed by walls and hedges of box, holly, laurel, and yew trees. There are also huge terracotta pots and many tall, thin Irish yew trees. These yew trees were originally grown right on the estate from small cuttings!
Filoli's gardens are a great example of a gardening style that brought back formal Italian designs. This style became popular in the late 1800s.
The gardens gently slope southeast from the house. The "sunken garden" is the first main area. It has a rectangular pool in the middle with water lilies. On either side of the pool are two grassy areas and two olive trees, all within a hedge of trimmed Japanese yew. The "walled garden" has several smaller areas, including a design that looks like a stained-glass window, made from clipped boxwood plants.
Since the National Trust took over in 1975, Filoli has been open for public tours. You can take self-guided tours, join a guided tour, or even go for nature hikes.
The formal gardens include special spots like the "Wedding Place." This area is named after Berenice Roth's wedding, which took place there in 1941. Both Lurline and Berenice Roth had their wedding parties at Filoli. However, Berenice's was the only wedding held at Filoli when it was still a private home.
The largest garden areas are "working gardens." This means they grow cut flowers for the mansion and some vegetables.
The Orchard
The Filoli Gentlemen's Orchard was started by the Bourn family in the early 1900s. However, the Roth family didn't keep up the orchard very well. By the 1970s, it was in bad shape.
In 1997, a group called the California Rare Fruit Growers started donating rare plants to help restore the orchard. Today, the orchard has over 650 trees! Many of these are rare types of fruit that were almost lost. This includes 275 kinds of apple trees, 59 pear varieties, 42 peach varieties, 6 medlar trees, and many more.
Nature and Conservation
Laguna Creek, also known as "Orchard Creek," flows through the Filoli property. It starts on the western side of Edgewood County Park and flows northwest into the Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir. From there, its water eventually joins San Mateo Creek and flows down to San Francisco Bay.
Long ago, fish like coho salmon and steelhead trout (a type of rainbow trout) used to swim up these creeks from the Bay to lay their eggs. However, in 1877, a dam was built on Laguna Creek. This dam stopped the salmon and steelhead from swimming further upstream into the creeks on Filoli's land. Today, rainbow trout that live in the stream still swim up the creeks from the reservoir to spawn.
Historians have noted that there were once large groves of redwood trees in the Laguna Creek area. Around Filoli, there were two old lumber mills. This suggests that the area was heavily logged in the past. You can still see a large redwood tree on Laguna Creek, just below Filoli's lower parking lot.
The Estate Trail
In 2017, Filoli opened The Estate Trail. This trail lets visitors explore the natural areas outside the formal gardens. As you walk the trail, you'll pass through a horse pasture, a field of native plants, and a former horse barn. This barn has been turned into the Sally MacBride Nature Center. The trail also leads to a bridge that crosses the San Andreas Fault, a famous earthquake fault line that runs through the property.
Filoli in Movies and TV
Filoli has been used as a filming location for many Hollywood movies and TV shows. Its most famous appearance is in the opening credits of the television series Dynasty. You can see the mansion from the air in those credits.
The inside of the mansion was also used in the first few episodes of Dynasty. Later, the sets were rebuilt in a studio. However, the entire mansion was used for a special TV show in 2006 called Dynasty Reunion: Catfights & Caviar. This was the first time many of the show's actors had been to the real Filoli estate!
Many large, old trees on the grounds have also appeared in films. There's a row of huge Italian Stone Pine trees and scattered Coast Live Oak trees that are over 250 years old. These oak trees were the background for scenes with Warren Beatty in the movie Heaven Can Wait.
Filoli has also been featured in TV shows like Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes of America and America's Castles: Garden Estates. The latter is shown continuously at Filoli's visitor center.
The house was also used as the Stanhope residence in the 1997 film George of the Jungle. And it appeared in the movie The Game in the same year.
Images for kids
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Reception Room
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Kitchen
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Drawing Room
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Library
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Dining Room
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Ballroom
See also
In Spanish: Jardín Filoli para niños
- National Trust for Historic Preservation – historic sites
- List of botanical gardens in the United States
