He's the owner of the Pacific Design Center and is in the process of adding a Red building to the 14-acre parcel. It's a pair of sleek asymmetrical structures that sit on either side of a landscaped open-air palm court. I profiled Cohen in the April issue of Los Angeles magazine (not available online). Some background: Cohen is a veeery rich NY real estate guy who took over the family business in the early 80s and snapped up the then-struggling PDC in 1999. Actually, it was Cohen and another group of investors, who later sold their stake to Cohen and are now suing him for allegedly being shortchanged. Even before the Red building goes up, Cohen has plowed $50 million into the complex, more than he expected. Here are some excerpts:

Charles Cohen wants to make it perfectly clear that he owns and operates the massive Pacific Design Center, with its idiosyncratic Blue and Green buildings and its soon-to-be constructed Red building. That’s Charles Cohen – and if you happen to forget it, he has Cohen etched 54 times into the six glass doors at the entrance. He also has a bio that manages to use “remarkable revitalization,” “universally hailed,” and “unequivocal triumph” in a single sentence. “Don’t be surprised if he seems abrupt,” warns one of Cohen’s people as we wait for him on the main floor of Blue – what’s been tagged the “Blue Whale.”

I’ve been warned about a lot. Cohen expects his male employees to always wear white dress shirts (something about colored shirts he doesn’t like). He insists on signing every check that comes out of his New York-based company, Cohen Brothers Realty Corporation, even if it means having them overnighted to wherever he happens to be. And if you’re a potential tenant, be prepared for Cohen to put you through the financial wringer – assuming he even wants you in. When I ask one of his business associates about Cohen’s personality, the response is: “Large – let’s just leave it at that.”

A standard-issue landlord/developer is content with collecting rent and buying and selling buildings. With Cohen, it’s different. He has several conventional office properties – his signature address is 623 Fifth Avenue, next to Saks and across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. But he also wants to be known as a “redeveloper,” someone who buys existing real estate and then makes it over. In New York, he took the 39-story former Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield building and turned it into an office tower that’s now the headquarters of advertising giant McCann-Erikson, among others. Before the PDC, he bought and overhauled New York’s Decoration & Design—or D&D—building, another high-end merchandise mart. Cohen’s portfolio totals more than 12 million square feet.

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As many times as I had been in the Blue Whale for screenings or receptions (there’s a handsome theater in the complex), the place always has been a mystery. The Blue Whale looks like a fancy shopping mall—six stories, wide expanse, lots of escalators, modern design—except without all the people. The “stores” are showrooms that display sofas, tables, beds, ovens, sinks, bathtubs, lighting fixtures, rugs, patio furniture—most everything for a house. A mega-million dollar house, that is. Cohen wants to attract the top percent of one percent, the sort who can swing $18,000 for a 9 foot by 12 foot rug or $30,000 for a chair.

You won’t get thrown out if you come in and browse, but only licensed designers, working on behalf of their clients, are supposed to make purchases. Designers typically buy at a discounted “to the trade” price and tack on a commission, sometimes 30 percent or more, or charge a separate fixed fee for their services. Hang out at the PDC long enough and you’ll see a pattern: pairs of shoppers—typically a designer and his or her client—going from showroom to showroom. Barbra Streisand, Salma Hayek, and Christina Aguilera have been regulars, though it’s not just a celebrity haunt. Kathleen White-Almanza, who sells Italian antiques and custom pieces at her showroom, Eccola, says it’s common for a couple and their designer to fly in from, say, Texas, make $100,000 worth of purchases, and fly back the same day. White-Almanza points to a pair of Italian mannequins, circa 1850s, that are going for $40,000. “High-end play toys,” she says.

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Cohen Brothers Realty was started by Charles’s father, Sherman, and his uncles Edward and Mortimer. Their savviest move came in 1955 when New York’s elevated rail line along Third Avenue was dismantled; the Cohens, among others, rushed in to buy land and develop high-rise apartments and offices. Charles Cohen remembers writing up lease renewals when he was a young teenager, though his early interest was in filmmaking and later entertainment law (he graduated from Brooklyn Law School). After failing to land a show business job, he went to work at Chemical Bank’s real estate division. Cohen returned to the family business in 1979. Four years later he was running the place.

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Selling high-end home furnishings can be enormously lucrative. Say you walk into a showroom and put down a deposit on a $25,000 table that’s being made to order. Typically, the deposit covers the cost of making the table. The balance becomes the profit, and if you don’t show up, they can always sell the item to someone else. They are in effect using your money to finance their operations, which means zero cost of goods and zero inventory.

There’s no way to know how much Cohen generates from the PDC or how much he’s worth. His company is privately held, and real estate moguls can leverage their deal-making in exotic and indecipherable ways with little upfront cash (Cohen forked over only $15 million in equity for the PDC, but has put in more since then). All indication would point to stupendous wealth, which is one reason he gets invited to lots of fundraisers—he’s among the upper-crusters regularly photographed in the New York Social Diary—and why he wound up in People magazine’s “Top 50 Bachelors” list after he and his first wife, Alexandra, ended their 17-year marriage.

Cohen remarried a few years later, in 2004, to South African-born Clo Jacobs, who was a stunning Gucci marketing executive roughly 20 years his junior. Jacobs says she was oblivious of the wealth and prominence when the two first met at a dinner party in London. “He’s fast and has a lot of energy and you don’t think he’s taking it all in,” she says, noting how he phoned her days later and had remembered her interest in guitar. “I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I’ve known people who were desperate to marry me, but they would never have done that.”