Big rural estates with classically designed houses are rare in the western U.S. Most wealthy people in the west congregate closer together on the weekends in places like Santa Barbara or Napa Valley when not residing closer to the big cities. The few exceptions were built in the early decades of the 20th century. In the San Francisco Bay Area it was once fashionable to carve out large estates in San Mateo County. Most of these were long ago carved up for suburban development but a couple of relics remain. Villa Lauriston is one such example, still in private hands. Filoli, near Woodside, is another example that is now open to the public, is a popular wedding venue, and includes a notable garden. Mountain Meadow (AKA the Phleger Estate) is another relic that still exists in private hands (for now at least).
Mountain Meadow was once part of the Spring Valley Water Company, a water utility and reservoir for San Francisco owned by William Bourn. Bourn built his weekend house, Filoli, on company land and in 1927 he carved out a section and sold it to Samuel Eastman, a Vice President with Spring Valley, and his wife Adelaide. Eastman hired the architect, Gardner Dailey, to design the 8,000 square foot house that sits on the estate today, a fusion of mission and tudor styles that the Eastmans called Summerholm.
In 1935 the Eastmans sold Summerholm to Herman and Mary Elena Phleger. The Phlegers bought adjoining parcels to create a 1,300 acre estate that they dubbed Mountain Meadow. Herman Phleger was a Harvard-trained lawyer from Sacramento who became a major force in California, national and international legal circles. He frequently represented big corporations trying to bust labor unions and was a personal attorney to William Randolph Hearst, the archetype of sensationalist journalism and misinformation and the builder of Hearst Castle. Herman was even one of Hearst’s pallbearers at his funeral. On the positive side of the ledger, Phleger served as legal counsel to the prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials of nazi war criminals and was instrumental in restructuring the German government and economy in the wake of the Second World War. He was heavily involved in arms control, reducing Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union and negotiating many of the treaties that define the post-war era. Herman Phleger died in 1984 and soon afterwards his widow and daughter began the process of selling most of Mountain Meadow to the Peninsula Open Space Trust. This process was completed in 1994 and most of the estate was transferred to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area as a park and natural area open to the public.
The house itself and 24 acres were carved out of the sale to the Trust and separately sold in 1991 to Gordon and Betty Moore. Gordon Moore was a co-founder and CEO of Intel, the maker of most of the microprocessors that power today’s personal computers and laptops. The Phleger family has also held on to 23 acres of the former Mountain Meadow estate. The Moores used their home, still called Mountain Meadow, as a weekend retreat until 2023 when both Gordon and Betty passed away a few months apart. Mountain Meadow is currently for sale for $29.5 million. The listing can be seen here.
North American Country Estates 