[6] The principal designer, San Francisco architect Willis Polk, used a free Georgian style that incorporated the tiled roofs characteristic of California.

The horticulturist who designed the plantings and fixed the original color schemes was Isabella Worn; she supervised the garden's maintenance for 35 years.

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.

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.

[11] 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.

[15] 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.

[17] 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 (illustration, right) and punctuated by massive terracotta pots and many narrowly columnar Irish yews, originally grown on the estate from cuttings.

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.

[23] San Mateo County historian Frank Stanger cited sizeable groves of redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) in the Laguna Creek watershed.

[4] 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.

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.