The Filoli Estate was built along the length of a valley. Approximately 25 miles south of San Francisco on land previously used for farming and cattle grazing, it was built in 1917 to be the country home of wealthy entrepreneur, William Bowers Bourn II. Today it belongs to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Volunteers and horticulturists maintain the 36,000 square-foot house, and 16 acre garden, as well as give tours and workshops relating to its property and history. The Estate is representative of the era in which it was made. Carefully preserved as it is now, it serves as a kind of time capsule into that time. It was built during the “Golden Age” in California design and architecture, in which many styles were combined and conventional rules broken in favor of creativity and expression.
Two years prior to its making, in 1915, 
It is also relevant in that Mr. Bourn was involved with financing and planning of the exhibition. Filoli’s architect, Willis Polk was the lead architect of the Exhibition, and Bruce Porter, who planned Filoli’s garden, had paintings featured in the Expo. Polk was a famous architect in the San Francisco Bay Area. He worked with Mr. Bourn on number of the Bourn's other properties. In my impression from reading about him, Mr. Bourn seems like he was a very ambitious, original and creative, using his money effectively in business, and in his support of the arts. In the creation of Filoli, Mr. Bourn was the ringleader to a team of artists and designers, and worked closely with Polk to create the estate.
The house and garden were meant to complement each other. This happens in the layout of spaces, and in the architectural designs made by the buildings and plants throughout the garden. Both the house and garden are a series of rooms; rectangular and square spaces in which an environment is built. The main hallway of the house, called the Transverse Hallway, is a long north to south passage. This long pathway is repeated in the garden, along several long north-south paths. I think this lends to the formality, or orderliness of the garden. Almost all the paths in the garden are arranged north to south or east to west; there are not very many diagonal paths. The way in which it is arranged longer north to south reflects the length of the valley it is in, with the Santa Cruz Mountains stretching parallel on the west side. The way the plants are used in the garden makes them almost like architectural elements. In many of the spaces, thick bushes are sculpturally trimmed to divide spaces like walls would. Throughout the estate, there are many tall and narrow Irish yews. These are also carefully trimmed and pruned frequently to keep a consistent shape. These feel like they act as columns in many instances, creating open but distinct passages (a particular example of this is in the “yew allee,” a north-south passage in the garden leading up to the “high place.”) Other than bushes and trees, flowers are also carefully placed and arranged in the ground and pots along the paths. In some spaces, the lawns are shaped around flower beds with particularly designed edges that feel very architectural. The self-guided tour booklet describes these kinds of details as “art imitating nature, and nature imitating art.” Towards the southern end of the garden, there is a space for the cultivation of cutting flowers for arrangements for inside the house.
The house is a mixture of Classical European architectural traditions. This type of mixture was the stuff that was so new at the time. I think that while it feels old fashioned to me, it is also the kind of European influenced design that I am most familiar with, having grown up in the Bay Area. The house is a modified Georgian style. This is so, in that it is a rather boxy, two storied shape, and has evenly spaced multi-paned windows The house is laid out in a U-shape, with the servants section and kitchens to the left (if one is facing the entrance), and the grand ballroom and owners rooms on the right. This difference is identified in the windows: the left (servants) side has tall rectangular windows, and the right side has tall windows with arched tops. The center section is a mixture of the two, with arched windows on the bottom, and rectangular ones on the top. Doorways and passages inside the house were also a mixture of rectangular and arched frames, and many of the passageways in the garden had arched tops. Another distinct European style is the roof, which has Spanish tiles, giving the house a feeling of 
This trip was useful to me in helping me to begin to understand this kind of architecture and design. It was also a rather roundabout but fun way to learn some Bay Area history. I used to feel that buildings with this kind of architecture contained too much history and flourish for me to understand. I would look at them and think, “Woah, that’s fancy,” and avoid thinking too much about it because it was difficult to understand. In trying to figure Filoli out, an exciting point was when I found that balustrades are called balustrades. It was cool to put a name and explanation to a thing that I had seen before, and had felt something about, but had not known what it was or why it intrigued me.
Since I am not very knowledgeable about plants and gardens, I found this garden geek of a blogger’s interpretation of Filoli to be informative and amusing. It also has lots of pictures of the place on a sunnier day.
This site was useful in getting an overview of the architectural trends in the Bay Area at the time, and has a helpful listing of Polk's work.
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