For 15 years, Ram Katalan and wife Laura McHolm have run their moving and self-storage business at a leased 380,000-square-foot property shared with another company in Chatsworth.
“We were subleasing from them,” Katalan explained.
But in the midst of the pandemic, the couple found themselves needing to relocate after the owner-user of their site got acquired by a new parent company. The couple, who reside in Santa Monica, personally supervised the July 1 move to the new location. “We’re literally a couple blocks away (from the previous location),” McHolm said.
Katalan and McHolm have other NorthStar locations: One in in San Mateo with 20,000 square feet; and another in Phoenix, which totals just under 10,000 square feet.
One unusual service which the Chatsworth location provides is temporarily store furniture and personal effects from houses used as filming locations. The NorthStar team take photos of the furniture, bookshelves and other interior arrangements prior to filming, then moves everything into storage so the film designers have a blank canvas to decorate the set. When filming concludes, NorthStar returns and replaces the furniture in the proper arrangement.