The jewel in Killarney’s tourism crown, Muckross House and Gardens, played host to some very special visitors when a delegation from its twin residence, Filoli Country House in California, also known as the Bourn-Roth Estate, spent a day in Killarney National Park.

The 26-strong group of Filoli friends and donors, led by President and CEO Kara Newport, travelled from the US to visit the Gardens of Ireland last week and, on Thursday, they enjoyed a day-long visit to William Bourn’s former Killarney residence which inspired the Filoli project.
Set on 16 acres of formal gardens surrounded by a 654-acre estate, Filoli is a historical landmark in California listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the US. It was built between 1915 and 1917 for William Bowers Bourn II and his wife, Agnes.
Around that time, Bourn regularly took his family to visit Europe and while on an Atlantic crossing in 1906, his daughter Maud met Arthur Rose Vincent, from Cloonlara in Co Clare.

They were married four years later and Bourn purchased Muckross House and its surrounding 11,000 acres, on the Lakes of Killarney, for their daughter and new son-in-law and immediately began plans to develop the gardens.

The Bourns travelled frequently to Ireland to visit their beloved daughter and soon fell in love with the local landscape. William’s affection for his daughter and Killarney was so strong that he decided to build a Californian home reminiscent of his daughter’s Killarney estate.

They commissioned the construction of the Georgian style Filoli Country House and they engaged the highly acclaimed Willis Polk as the principal architect with instructions to use Muckross House as a model.
Nestled at the edge of towering oak and redwood-forests in the coastal foothills, just 30 miles south of San Francisco, there are amazing similarities between the 43-room stately residence and the house at Muckross.
It served as one of their residences from 1917 until the time of both William and Agnes Bourn’s deaths in 1936. The estate was sold the following year to William P Roth and Lurline Matson Roth, heiress to the Matson Navigation Company, and in 1975 they donated the estate in its entirety to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The Filoli estate operates as a private, non-profit organisation with its own board of governors, staff and volunteers and it attracts in the region of 400,000 visitors per year.
It has been the set of a number of Hollywood films and, most famously, it was the mansion seen from the air in the opening credits of the smash hit television drama series Dynasty.
Like Muckross House, Filoli is run by a Board of Trustees with a very significant National Parks input. The Trustees of Muckross House are a not-for-profit charity organisation which runs the enterprises in order to preserve the crafts and to preserve and maintain the history, heritage and folklife of Kerry.
All funding generated on site is spent on achieving those goals as well as on the maintenance of the house and on enhancing the visitor experience for visitors.
The group visiting Filoli’s twin residence in Muckross – joined by the bond that was William Bourn – was formally welcomed by Muckross House Trustee Sandra Dunlea and Denis Reidy along with Pat Dawson of the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
They enjoyed a tour of the historic house accompanied by head guide Anne Tangney, a private viewing of the amazing art on show with library and research staff, a trip around the magnificently manicured gardens and a visit to Muckross Traditional Farm with head gardener Gerry Murphy.