Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Pulgas Water Temple and Filoli, the house

May 2014
In our quest to do a few more local things, I took Kahn to see the Pulgas water temple and Filoli.  Water is a big deal in our area-we have droughts on a regular basis and way too many people in the area to be supported by the local watersheds.  So of course being the engineers that we humans are, we get some of our water from the Yosemite Valley, over a hundred miles away.  The Pulgas water temple is a Greek style monument marking the spot where the water that we pull out of the Hetch Hetchy  becomes the Crystal Springs Reservoir.  It is beautiful, but a little weird.

The temple is, of course, in front of a water feature


Classic lines all around


In the center of the temple the grid covers the water flowing out of the pipe into the reservoir though on this day nothing was happening.


We had an actual rainy day but there were still a few other groups at the site.

Then off to Filoli, a Grand estate from back in the day.  The first family made their money from shipping and the house is furnished with period pieces.
Like this hat, which is decorated with nautical/island themed items.

These always fascinate me-the board that lights up in the servants area so you know who/where in the house they need you...so handy?

I just had to photograph this because these are the light switches I grew up with.  We had a ~100 year old house that had not been modernized and I still kind of like the push button switches.

The gardens are amazing and there is a special area specifically to make bouquets for the house.
Here are some of the flowers out in the conservatory.

 So perfect it looks fake



Back to the inside of the house...
This is the wall paper in the wet bar area

The wood floors in each room had their own pattern/type of wood

 This is gouged by hand to look this way-not my favorite, but interesting


There are some ungodly number of fireplaces
 the one in the ballroom is large
 no, really large!



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