cottage

She rented the two-bedroom Poplar Boulevard cottage in 1995, living there a dozen years before tragedy, addiction and mental illness left her unable to pay the rent and led her kids to scatter.

“It’s not a cottage without a garden,” Brown says, smiling.

Grocery stores sell sauerkraut, borscht and blinis with cottage cheese.

In Altadena, hundreds of renters occupied a type of housing common in the first half of the 20th century and almost never built today — clusters of single-family bungalows or cottages on a single parcel.

Instead of resembling a box, the structure consists of a sequence of vaulted domes nestled together, like a lost cottage straight out of a storybook.