Carolands

The Carolands Chateau was commissioned in 1912 by Harriett Pullman Carolan, heiress to the Pullman railroad-car fortune, and her husband Francis Carolan, on 554 acres they had bought in western Hillsborough. Ernest Sanson designed it in Paris in the Beaux-Arts manner, Willis Polk ran the construction from 1914, and Achille Duchêne laid out the gardens. The Carolans took up residence in 1916. The house has 98 rooms on four and a half floors, about 46,000 square feet in all.

They did not stay long. The house was closed in 1918, then emptied and put up for sale in 1928. For the next seventy years it passed through a string of owners, stood vacant for long stretches, was vandalized, and more than once was scheduled for demolition. Countess Lillian Remillard Dandini bought it in 1950, by then with under six acres, and lived there until her death in 1973. It became a California Historical Landmark and joined the National Register in 1975. Charles and Ann Johnson bought it in 1998, spent four years on a near-total rebuild, lived in it for a decade, and in 2012 gave it to the Carolands Foundation, which opens it for curator-led tours most Wednesdays. Places are drawn by lottery.

The neighborhood began as the estate came apart. In 1929 a French-style gatehouse went up at Ralston and Eucalyptus Avenues to mark the entrance to the new Carolands subdivision, and from 1930 the land was sold off piece by piece, about 64 acres over the next fifteen years. When Tomlinson Moseley bought the chateau and its remaining 490 acres in 1945, most of the rest followed. Robin Road, Remillard Drive and the streets around them are that land.

The first houses were the formal estates of the 1930s. Most of the neighborhood came after the war, ranch and contemporary houses built to the slopes and the views, and the typical Carolands home dates from the late 1950s. A few recent houses return to the scale of the originals, among them 195 Robin Road, designed by Jack McCarthy, built by Galli Builders and begun in 2001. Lots are large but not uniform: most run from half an acre to an acre, and a few are two acres or more.

Carolands is western Hillsborough, up the hill from Ralston Avenue and close to the Nueva School. A house here usually sells for between $5 million and $8 million, much as in Hillsborough as a whole. One sold for $70 million in August 2026. Homes rarely wait, and most are in contract within two weeks. The chateau's grounds sit in the middle of it all, and a place on a Wednesday tour is the best way to see what the whole hill once was.

Ed has sold four homes in Carolands, on Barbara Way, Darrell Road, Denise Drive and Robin Road. The most recent was 195 Robin Road in 2023, which he sold for its owners at $12.75 million.