Westridge, Portola Valley Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

Westridge was carved from the Ormondale Ranch, a roughly 1,400-acre horse and cattle ranch on land the Town's archive traces back to ranchero Maximo Martinez. It started as the Menlo Stock Farm and was renamed for Ormondale, a promising colt foaled in 1903 to Ormonde, the unbeaten English Triple Crown winner of 1886 who spent his last years on the ranch. (The archive still keeps a wisp of his tail.) After World War II the ranch was sold off in pieces: Ladera in 1946, Westridge from 1947, Oak Hills in 1955 and Arrowhead Meadows from 1957.

The Westridge Company, formed by a structural engineer, a civil engineer and an architect, bought 209 acres in 1947 and kept adding land. Partner Jesse Hayes and his colleagues set a 2.5-acre minimum lot with a bridle-path easement in every deed, and in January 1948 created the Westridge Architectural Supervising Committee to review houses, outbuildings, landscaping, grading, signs and fences. The partners sat on it for its first ten years; elected owners have run it since. The subdivision went in as 181 lots in ten sections, from 1947 into the mid-1960s. In the late 1950s, before the town existed, owners petitioned San Mateo County to raise its one-acre zoning to match their 2.5-acre rule, and the county agreed; the committee's minutes call the 1960 change the first time county land was zoned upward at owners' request.

Oak Hills, next door, was 126 acres sold in 1955 to 12 buyers who planned 5- to 20-acre parcels for their own houses; the archive says two acres became the minimum lot, and Golden Hills Drive is its main street. Westridge Drive itself follows the ranch's old main drive from the Ladera side, and the archive credits John McLaren, of Golden Gate Park, with directing the tree planting along it: Monterey pines, cedar and cypress on Alamos Road and live oaks from Goya Road to Mapache Drive.