The Stevenson House was built by Don Rafael Gonzalez, a customs administrator, in the 1830s in Monterey. The original two-story adobe structure comprised of a sala and a large room upstairs. The property was expanded when Don Rafael Gonzalez sold the property to Juan Girardin, a Swiss businessman, who operated a general store on the first floor and added a boarding house named the French Hotel.

One of the French Hotel’s most noteworthy guests was famed writer Robert Louis Stevenson who boarded for a few months in 1879.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the property was a gathering place for Monterey’s vibrant arts community.

The house was gifted to the State of California in 1941 by Mrs. Celia Tobin Clark and Mrs. Edith Van Antwerp as a memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson, for whom the property is named.

Today the building showcases many of Stevenson’s possessions along with a variety of antique furniture and art, including four large paintings of Monterey’s workers done for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.