Kimberly Crest

Kimberly Crest is a twenty-two-room French chateau-style mansion built in eighteen ninety-seven on a hillside in Redlands, commissioned by Cornelia Hill and designed by architects Oliver Perry Dennis and Lyman Farwell. In nineteen oh five it was purchased by John Alfred Kimberly, a co-founder of the Kimberly-Clark Paper Company in Wisconsin, and his wife Helen. Helen added the Italian Renaissance gardens and furnished the interior to the standard of a robber-baron estate in full bloom.

When their daughter, Mary Kimberly Shirk, inherited the property, she gave it to the people of Redlands rather than sell it, forming the nonprofit that maintains it today. The house is a California Historical Landmark and a National Register property, and it sits on six acres of landscaped grounds that feel entirely out of time, one of the Inland Empire's most unexpected architectural discoveries.