Michael Cohen

They especially loved the area of Altadena lining the canyon, a neighborhood called The Meadows.

It sits in the mountains far up a winding road and overlooks the San Gabriel Valley, and it backs right up to the Angeles National Forest.

One day, a house came on the market that had been owned and built by a mid-century industrial designer named Niels Diffrient.

It had five giant sets of glass sliding doors on one side of the house.

It was dripping with mid-century details.

It was perfect.

They placed a bid and crossed their fingers.

In 2022, after a lot of back and forth, they moved in.

Mike and his wife, Chelsea, moved to L.A.

in 2022 from the East Coast.

Mike was raised in New Jersey and was used to renting tiny apartments in New York City for what felt like way too much money.

I think when we were living in New York, we felt like we'll never be able to buy a place that we would want to live in.

And that was part of what led us to California was how much more we could get for the money that we had.

Mike and Chelsea also came into some money for a down payment a bit unexpectedly when the company she worked for and where she had equity was sold.

Mike says they bid on something like 24 homes but kept getting priced out.

And then our friends introduced us to Altadena and it's this funny little funky, half hippie, half mountain folk, like tiny town on the corner of Los Angeles.

And we actually went and saw the house that we ended up buying, and we didn't even take a video.

We just walked in.

We were like, this is it.

This is great.