Mike Kobeissi
Real estate broker in La Cañada Flintridge, California, who started the firm Kobeissi Properties
La Cañada Flintridge, explained and sourced
Mike Kobeissi, a California real estate broker, has worked the La Cañada Flintridge market for three decades and started Kobeissi Properties there, the firm his family has worked in. He was born and raised in Lebanon and came to the United States at 18.
This encyclopedia is about the place around that work. The La Cañada community began in the early 1870s as a community of homesteaders and health seekers, and the guide to the town’s historical buildings collection at Lanterman House records how Senator Frank Putnam Flint’s Flintridge development of the 1920s drew architects such as Myron Hunt, Paul R. Williams and Wallace Neff.1 The two communities voted in 1976 to become one city rather than face annexation by Glendale or Pasadena.2 Its landmarks reach well beyond houses: Descanso Gardens, which the Cultural Landscape Foundation traces to a 165 acre estate bought in the San Rafael Hills in 1937, joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.3 The entries that follow take in the architects, the house styles, the gardens and mountains, the car culture and the Lebanese American story, and each one names its sources.
- Online Archive of California, Lanterman House History Center and Archives, La Cañada Flintridge Historical Buildings Collection, 1910 to 2017
- Los Angeles Times, La Canada Council Gets Rid of Hyphen It Never Wanted
- The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Descanso Gardens
Kobeissi Properties
Mike Kobeissi started Kobeissi Properties, the La Cañada Flintridge firm his family has worked in. His work there spans buying, selling, remodeling and building, with guidance on design, renovation and staging, and the agents speak Korean, Mandarin, Spanish and Polish.
The companyThe city of La Cañada Flintridge
The foothill city of La Cañada Flintridge is where Mike Kobeissi has worked the market for three decades, with sales that run to hundreds of homes. Its entry runs from the Spanish rancho and the health seekers of the 1870s to the Flintridge houses and the incorporation of 1976.
The townSix entries to start with
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Architects of the FoothillsMyron Hunt
A Massachusetts born designer who settled in Pasadena in 1903 and left a villa, a stadium, campuses and a Riverside hotel wing.
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Foothill House StylesSpanish Colonial Revival Architecture
Red tile, white walls and arches: how a fairground in Balboa Park set a regional look for three decades.
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La Cañada Flintridge HistoryDescanso Gardens
A publisher's camellia estate under coast live oaks that the county bought and a guild turned into a garden of rooms.
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The San Gabriel FoothillsMount Wilson Observatory
A mountaintop laboratory in the San Gabriels where big mirrors showed that the Milky Way is one galaxy among many.
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Collector Car CultureCars and Coffee
No fees, no trophies, no registration: the Orange County car meet whose name and rules were copied around the world.
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La Cañada Flintridge HistoryThe Arroyo Seco Parkway
Opened for the Rose Parade crowds of 1940, the road between Pasadena and downtown set the pattern for every Los Angeles freeway after it.
Every subject, from foothill history to car culture
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Subject 01La Cañada Flintridge History
From village sites and land grants to a foothill city that voted itself into being in 1976.
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Subject 02Community and Civic Life
Clubs, main streets, shared plots and parades, and what researchers have measured about them.
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Subject 03Architects of the Foothills
The designers behind the foothill house, and the archives that keep their drawings.
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Subject 04Foothill House Styles
Red tile and stucco, bungalow porches, ranch gables and glass walls: how to tell them apart.
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Subject 05Old Houses and Preservation
How old buildings are listed and protected, and how their original materials are repaired.
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Subject 06How Homes Change Hands
The stages of a home purchase and the forces around it, from commissions to the closing table.
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Subject 07Design and Renovation
Why houses get remodeled, which projects hold their value and where interior taste came from.
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Subject 08Gardens and Outdoor Living
Planting for dry summers and building the patio, the pool and the open wall to the garden.
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Subject 09Lebanon and Lebanese America
A migration that began in the 1880s, and the poets, entertainers, cooks and archives it produced.
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Subject 10Collector Car Culture
Saturday morning gatherings, judged lawns, museums, auctions and the hot rod garages behind them.
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Subject 11The San Gabriel Foothills
The range behind the town: its rock, its forest, its telescopes and its dry summers.
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Subject 12JPL and the Local Economy
The laboratory at the foot of the mountains, its missions and the aerospace region it belongs to.
On Blogger, Medium and WordPress
His pieces on real estate, historic homes and the housing industry appear on his Blogger blog, on Medium and on WordPress. The newest are listed here, and the bibliography carries every one.
All writing