Altamont, Taaffe & Moody Roads, Los Altos Hills Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

This was Rose Hill. The Town's 2016 history anthology says the one Taaffe heir who made the ranch his permanent home named his 1,100-acre share Rose Hill and built a 12-room house at the top of today's Taaffe Road. From 1887 to 1901 it was a stock and grain ranch, including hay for racehorses. A 1904 map in the anthology shows that section taking in the land near today's Byrne Preserve. After 1901 the ranch went into decline. The main house later burned, and the ranch was lost to foreclosure during the Depression. Altamont Road itself was Elizabeth Avenue until the Town Council renamed it in 1962.

Horses shaped the next chapter. In the mid-1940s a buyer of about 30 acres between Altamont Road and Central Drive built a six-stall, gambrel-roofed barn, which later owners expanded into the Westwind complex. In 1975 the Town bought part of the roughly 15-acre property, and the owner donated the rest along with the 24,000-square-foot barn (Town General Plan). Next door, a 55-acre grassland parcel was donated to the Nature Conservancy in 1967, and the Town bought it in 1968 on the condition that it stay natural. A 21-acre corridor linking it toward Hidden Villa was bought later. The 2007 General Plan lists Byrne Preserve at 88 acres, the Town's largest open space.

Moody Road follows Adobe Creek, which the anthology says rises on Black Mountain. The Town's history page notes the creek was the line between two ranchos, La Purísima Concepción and Rancho San Antonio. Adobe Creek Lodge Road is named for a recreation property that the Town's ban on commercial uses eventually closed. Farther up Moody Road is Hidden Villa, a 1,600-acre preserve and educational farm with roots in the 1920s. The anthology credits it with California's first youth hostel. Midpen has bought most of the land south of Moody Road, including Rancho San Antonio and the Neary Quarry ridge, so the hills behind these streets stay open.