Laurie Cohen and her husband Mark, the founder of Cohen Financial Group, knew they wanted to buy a certain 1930s mansion in Beverly Hills well before it actually came onto the market.

The house—a longtime residence of actress Ann Rutherford, who died in 2012— sat on a quiet street, directly across from a golf course. “It’s the best street in Beverly Hills,” Laurie Cohen says. “There’s no thoroughfare and, because of the golf course, there’s never going to be a neighbor who builds in front of us.”

It took the couple nine months of wrangling with Rutherford’s estate to get an offer accepted. In 2013, they bought it for about $8 million.

Then the real work began.

“I met the houseman, who was in the process of clearing everything out” of the home, she says. “The house was very glamorous, but you could tell that it hadn’t been taken care of.”

When they purchased it, the structure measured about 5,800 square feet. “It wasn’t a big house,” Cohen notes, but by the time she was done with her renovation and additions— she added entertainment rooms, a master suite, a hammam, and other improvements— it had swelled to 10,400 square feet.

“The idea was to create a house for myself and my husband, complete with luxury and enough space to have everything we wanted,” she says, “and to have enough space for my children when they come back, married, with kids.”

But it’s those very children that have caused the Cohens to put the house on the market a mere two years after moving in. “I’m moving to New York,” Cohen says. “Two out of the three [children] are on the East Coast, and a third is opening a business there, too.”

The couple put the house on the market last year for $39.9 million, and have since dropped the price to $31.9 million. The property is listed with Williams and Williams.

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