Filoli

The house is 54,256 square feet,and has 56 rooms total. This includes a ballroom, a reception room, a dining room, cozier family rooms, and servants quarters. While the home was empty when it reached the National Trust, much of the original furniture and art has been donated, to help them recreate the original appearance of the home.[12] This is an ongoing effort; in 2022 they restructured the gentleman's lounge to include new period typical additions to the room and add a recreation of the original wallpaper.[13]

Filoli houses two libraries with resources related to the families and the estate; the Friends Library Collection and the Sterling Library Collection. The Friends Library is a circulation library that holds 1,500 books, 125 videos, lectures, or oral histories, and several copies of movies filmed on the estate. The Sterling Library is a research library with 1,800 books and 40 journals. Both libraries are only open to Filoli members or researchers.[14]

• 
  Reflecting pool and former carriage house.
• 
  The Chartres Garden
• 
  The Sunken Garden

The 16 acres (6.5 ha) of gardens are structured as a series of formally enclosed spaces framed within brick walls and clipped hedges, which open one from another, providing long axial views, in which profuse naturalized plantings of hardy and annual plants contrast with lawns, brick and gravel paths, formal reflecting pools, framed in walls and clipped hedging in box, holly, laurel and yew (illustration, right) and punctuated by massive terracotta pots and many narrowly columnar Irish yews, originally grown on the estate from cuttings. Filoli is an outstanding example of the Anglo-American gardening style reintroducing Italian formality, that was pioneered at the end of the nineteenth century by Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll in British gardens and exemplified in the U.S. by designs of Charles A. Platt and Beatrix Farrand.[15]

The gardens extend southeast of the house running up an easy slope. The sunken garden is the first of four main rooms; the rectangular pool at its center that houses hardy and tropical water lilies is flanked by twin panels of lawn and two olive trees, within the hedge of clipped Japanese yew. The walled garden consists of a series of enclosures, including the stained glass window design outlined in clipped box

After it was acquired by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1975, Filoli has been open for public tours. Attractions include self-guided tours, guided tours, and nature hikes.

The formal gardens include several areas, including the Wedding Place, named for Berenice Roth's wedding location in 1941. Lurline and Berenice both had their wedding receptions at Filoli, but Berenice's wedding is the only one that has ever taken place at Filoli when it was a private home. The largest gardens are working gardens for the production of cut flowers for the mansion and for the growing of some vegetables.

Coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) on Laguna Creek tower over the oaks (just below Filoli's lower parking lot on main entrance road).

Laguna Creek, locally known as "Orchard Creek", flows northwest from its origin on the western slope of Edgewood County Park to Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir where its waters eventually join San Mateo Creek, and descend to San Francisco Bay.[18] In November 1769, Laguna Creek was the route of the Portolà expedition as they descended from their discovery of San Francisco Bay on Sweeney Ridge down San Andreas Creek to Laguna Creek and then southeast down the San Francisquito Creek watershed to El Palo Alto. After crossing to the west side of Cañada Road, Laguna Creek is joined on the left (heading downstream) by the South Fork Laguna Creek, then after crossing under the main entrance road to Filoli it is joined by locally named Fault Creek, then Spring Creek (possibly named by Bourn for his Spring Valley Water Company), then on the right by an unnamed creek, then by waters from the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct and Pulgas Water Temple just before entering Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir. Historically, the San Mateo Creek watershed hosted runs of anadromous salmonids, including coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) and steelhead trout (coastal rainbow trout) (Oncorhynchus mykiss irideus) coming up from the Bay. In 1877, Laguna Grande, a natural lake on Laguna Creek, was dammed with an earthen causeway[19] (now crossed by Highway 92) blocking further salmonid migration up into Laguna Creek and its tributaries on Filoli. Stream resident rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), continue to run up the creeks of Filoli from the reservoir to spawn.[20]

San Mateo County historian Frank Stanger cited sizeable groves of redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) in the Laguna Creek watershed. In the area around Filoli he described two historic lumber mills. The historic "Smith Mill" on Fault Creek was destroyed by fire in 1854. Pinckney's mill in "the largest gulch", which would be Spring Creek, was built in 1855 and later purchased by S. L. Mastic. Although information on these mills is limited, they support the idea that "the area was thoroughly logged".[21] A large redwood tree remains on Laguna Creek just below the lower Filoli parking lot and on the main entrance road.

Filoli has served as the set for many Hollywood films.[24] Most famously, it is the mansion seen from the air in the opening credits of the television series Dynasty. The mansion's plush interiors were also featured in the first episodes of the series but were subsequently replicated on sound stages at the Fox Studios, Century City. However the entire mansion served as the setting for the 2006 CBS Television special Dynasty Reunion: Catfights & Caviar in which cast members reunited to discuss their memories of the series. It was the first time many of the cast members had been to the actual estate.

Among the many striking mature trees on the grounds are a row of immense Italian Stone Pines and scattered specimen native Coast Live Oaks over 250 years in age, the latter of which are the backdrop for Warren Beatty's outdoor scenes in Heaven Can Wait.

Filoli was featured in Bob Vila's A&E Network production, Guide to Historic Homes of America,[25] as well as in a November 1996 segment of A&E's America's Castles: Garden Estates, the latter being shown continuously at the visitor center.[26]

The house also served as the Stanhope residence in the 1997 film George of the Jungle and was featured in The Game in the same year.

• 
  Reception Room
• 
  Kitchen
• 
  Drawing Room
• 
  Library
• 
  Dining Room
• 
  Ballroom

• National Trust for Historic Preservation – historic sites
• List of botanical gardens in the United States

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Filoli.

• Filoli website
• Beyond the Back Gate: Filoli's "Wild Garden", a book on the nature preserve surrounding Filoli
• Beyond the Back Gate: Filoli's "Wild Garden", a seven-minute film documentary discussing the nature preserve surrounding Filoli
• Stackpole, Peter (photographer) (18 August 1947). "The Peninsula: It is the playground of San Francisco Society". LIFE. Vol. 23, no. 7. pp. 85–93. ISSN 0024-3019. Retrieved 29 March 2015. Features photographs of Filoli during William P. Roth's ownership.