Filoli served as one of the Bourns' residences from 1917 to 1936. The name of the estate is an acronym formed by combining the first two letters from the key words of William Bourn's credo: "Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life." Bourn's Spring Valley Water Company owned Crystal Springs Reservoir and the surrounding area. Bourn called the Crystal Springs Reservoirs "Spring Valley Lakes" for his company. The original Spring Valley was between Mason and Taylor Streets, and Washington and Broadway Streets in San Francisco, where the water company started. When the company went south for more water, the Spring Valley name was carried south too. Bourn also owned Muckross House in Ireland and is reputed to have used Muckross as a model for Filoli.

Roth family  

Following the deaths of William and Agnes Bourn in 1936, the estate was sold the following year to Mr. William P. Roth and Mrs. Lurline Matson Roth, heiress to the Matson Navigation Company. The Roth family built Filoli's botanic collections of camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas, notably in the Woodland Garden, and added the serene swimming pool and the screened-in teahouse.

Current status  

In 1975, Mrs. Roth donated the estate in its entirety to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with an endowment that helps support annual operating expenses. The estate operates as Filoli Center, a private, non-profit organization with its own Board of Governors, staff, and volunteers. As of 2022, Filoli was drawing about 400,000 visitors per year. In 2023, Filoli hosted the first meeting on U.S. soil in several years between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the 2023 APEC summit in San Francisco. The two world leaders met at Filoli on November 15, 2023, during President Xi's visit to California. Although Filoli had been popular for many years with Asian tourists visiting the San Francisco Bay Area (due to its gardens and its prominent appearance in the opening credits of the television series Dynasty), the extensive press coverage of the Xi-Biden meeting led to a surge of interest among both Chinese and Chinese American tourists.

House

The house is 54,256 square feet (5,040.5 m2) in size, and has a total of 56 rooms. 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 recreate the original appearance of the home. This is an ongoing effort; in 2022 the gentleman's lounge was restructured to include new period-typical additions to the room and add a re-creation of the original wallpaper.

Library  

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 to researchers.

Gardens  

The 16 acres (6.5 ha) of gardens are structured as a series of formally enclosed spaces framed by 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 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.

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.

Orchard  

Filoli Gentlemen's Orchard was started by Bourn family in the early 20th century, however the Roth family did not maintain the orchard and by the 1970s it was in poor condition. In 1997, the California Rare Fruit Growers began donating rare plants to restore the orchard. Many of the current 650+ trees in the orchard are lost varieties of fruit and include: 275 varieties of apple trees, 59 pear varieties, 42 peach varieties, 6 medlar, and many more.