Curling iron inventor’s Portland palace for sale at $2.9 million
Updated Mar 10, 2021;
By the 1920s, Oregon entrepreneur Clarissa Keyes Inman had amassed a small fortune. She had invented the electric curling iron, which helped turn flappers’ bobbed hairstyles into a bouncy rebellion during the Roaring Twenties. And she had married Robert D. Inman, who co-founded the Inman-Poulsen Lumber Company, once the
Before her marriage to a lumber baron, she first wed the chief engineer on the lighthouse tender, Manzanita, and later in life, her chauffeur.
“Clara” Inman was avant-garde in another way: When she was a widow for the second time after Robert Inman died, she cashed out her curling iron profits and hired architect David Lochead Williams to design her 1926 Mediterranean mansion with a red tile roof and an open floor plan on an elevated estate in Portland’s West Hills.