Filoli

Started: 2025-08-11 20:14:18

Submitted: 2025-08-11 21:51:15

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Visiting a historic house and its formal gardens

As part of my ongoing campaign to leave the house and see interesting things, in April we went to see Filoli, half-way up the peninsula in the San Andreas rift valley with a Woodside mailing address. Kiesa was enthusiastic about this outing because it involved seeing a grand historic house. The kids went along dutifully.

We started in the grand entry in the middle of the house, at the base of the "U" in a courtyard between two wings of the house. (It was a bright spring day and my camera did not appreciate trying to take a picture of a backlit building above a bright gravel patio. I suppose I can't really fault the designers of the house a hundred years ago for failing to take my ease of photography into consideration; though given that photography was well-established by then it must have troubled their own staff photographers as well.) We stepped into the house and immediately saw a series of elaborately-furnished sitting rooms decorated to look like the house when it was occupied by the first family to live there. There were separate coat rooms for ladies and gentlemen, and separate rooms for entertaining, furnished with period-appropriate furniture and accessories.

In a closet off the main hallway was an old fuse panel, built on a giant slab of stone with fuses and knife switches making the electrical connections for multiple circuits in the house, with little labels for each circuit. It was somewhat terrifying to see that many live contacts, but it was easy to see how each circuit worked and how one would open the circuit to replace the fuses when needed. It's the same principle as my home circuit breaker but more transparent in its design and primitive in its execution.

We walked through the kitchens, where successive generations of residents had updated the equipment and the current curators had attempted to gently roll it back to show something a bit more historic. We started at the end of the kitchen in the pantry, which had been decorated with antique cans and boxes of food, which mostly served to highlight how empty and unused the pantry was in its current, display-only configuration. The food-prep kitchen was had a huge gas stove along one wall with an even bigger hood with plastic food laid out awkwardly on an island table in the middle of the room. The kitchen was big enough for at least a dozen people to work at once but it was hard to imagine the bustle of the kitchen during a formal dinner or event, or quiet breakfasts prepared for the family living in the house. I imagined a scene filled with actors playing kitchen staff running around preparing food, fading out to the empty kitchen we see today.

One of the sparsely-populated shelves in the kitchen had an antique coffee grinder that reminded me of a hand-crank coffee grinder I bought when I found myself living in Cupertino five years ago without a proper grinder.

Next door was the plating kitchen, where all of the china and crystal was stored and deployed to serve food to guests.

In the corner was the butler's pantry, locked by the butler to keep the silver secure when it wasn't in use.

And finally the formal dining room, here set up with a large table with six spacious settings that nonetheless was dwarfed by the massive room. was

On display in the dining room was a silverware box, laid out with a dozen different sizes and shapes of forks and knives and spoons for specific purposes that I could only begin to guess. The box, with the cutlery nestled neatly in felt, reminded me of my mother's formal silverware sets in a similar case, though smaller in size than this example.

Our route through the house took us back through the formal entertaining rooms and into the library, outfitted with built-in bookcases stacked high with books and multiple chairs and couches for lounging in front of the fire. (This house was built after the era in which fireplaces were necessary for interior heating, but most rooms still held a fireplace for ambiance and aesthetics.)

The last wing of the house, to our right when we walked through the courtyard to enter the house, held a giant ballroom that spanned the entire footprint and both stories of the wing. When we visited the ballroom was empty except for the large chandelier hanging from the ceiling, shining off the polished wood floor. The paintings lining the walls depicted the first owner's ancestral home on a wind-swept estate in Ireland that served as a model for the house when it was built.

This ballroom was used for a sidebar meeting between Presidents Biden and Xi during the 2023 APEC summit. There was a small display case with newspaper clippings and photos and artifacts from the meeting. The display did not answer my questions about the logistics of the event: does the president's staff keep a list of suitable venues that might be used in the event of a high-level bilateral meeting? Do they cold-call the venue to set up a private event? How long in advance do they have to plan a sensitive meeting between the leaders of two superpowers?

We left the house via a side door next to the kitchen where a pop-up bakery was selling cookies to call back to stories about the kitchen staff providing treats for the children who lived in the house through this window. We ate our cookies on a small patio where the estate's gardeners were selling plants grown at the estate's nurseries. (I browsed, but did not feel compelled to buy anything.) We left the patio through a small arch set in the brick wall leading into the extensive formal gardens that surrounded the estate.

As soon as I spotted the arch I recognized what the landscape architects were doing: they were focusing our attention as we transitioned from one part of the grounds to another, gradually revealing the view of the garden as we walked through the portal, before finally exposing the whole garden as we crossed the threshold. This reminded me of the common design of Mughal garden tombs; and recognizing the careful design of the landscape architecture only helped me appreciate it more.

We visited Filoli in the middle of spring, at a slightly-awkward transition period after the daffodils had bloomed and faded but before the rest of the garden was in its full beauty. In the grassy orchard above the sunken garden I could see the faded pods that had, until recently, been bright yellow flowers covering the whole hillside. The apple trees themselves were still budding, and the whole impression was a spring that was still coming up to speed after the winter rains.

Kiesa enlisted the help of another visitor to take our picture in the gardens, which may be the only picture we get of us as a family that isn't also a selfie.

The gardens had multiple sections, each with their own unique and elaborate landscape architecture. Other visitors were taking pictures for social media and enjoying the bright spring day in the elaborate gardens, just across the hill from the suburbs of the peninsula. (Filoli wanted me to know that I could get a membership that would allow me to visit as often as I wanted, but it was a bit far to come here from Santa Cruz just to visit the gardens again.)

Part of the upper garden, tucked away behind a hedge from the formal gardens, was a vegetable garden growing produce to be prepared and served at the cafe on the grounds.

After an hour in the gardens we exited via the gift shop and headed to the picnic area under the shade of several towering oak trees to eat a late lunch before returning home. I at least enjoyed the visit to the historic house and its elaborate formal gardens.

I took more pictures at Filoli at Photos on 2025-04-12.