The bank building on the corner of Foothill and Indian Hill Boulevards in Claremont is a typical, and typically beautiful, Millard Sheets bank design.

From its prominent corner location to its classically proportioned façade to its travertine cladding, it has every hallmark of a Home Savings and Loan branch, except it was never a Home Savings—it was the Claremont branch of Pomona First Federal Savings and Loan. The similarities are no coincidence, since this bank’s design is one that was rejected by Home Savings. Sheets used the finished design for a different client and a different location, apparently keeping it totally intact.

The New Formalist building, completed in 1969, is surrounded by an arcade of columns topped with an Egyptianesque lotus ornament, punctuated by a square opening in the overhang through which a palm tree grows. Its white travertine cladding is accented by a Sheets mosaic of Native Americans on horseback, surrounded by a profusion of yucca blossoms.

The building has been so sensitively updated over the years that it is almost completely intact, with the addition of a drive-up ATM station featuring a mosaic by Sheets Studio artist Denis O’Connor. As a result, the Pomona First Federal Savings and Loan building (now a U.S. Bank) remains an outstanding example of Sheets’s bank designs in his home city.