"This is the front door," actress Dakota Johnson says in a dramatic flourish as she greets a visitor to her Los Angeles home. “And so is this,” she says, opening an identical front door next to it. “And this one too!” The fact that an entire wall of her living room is a series of oversized front doors is just one of the unique quirks that drew Johnson to this midcentury-modern house buried in the trees of a sleepy Los Angeles cul-de-sac. The wall opposite it consists of three floor-to-ceiling windows that open like garage doors onto a lap pool. “It’s like a tree house. On a boat,” she proclaims.

The house was built by architect Carl Maston, and Johnson bought the residence four years ago, the second one that her realtor showed her on the single day she went to see L.A. properties. “I was immediately drawn to how it was clean but also cozy,” she says. “I thought, I’ll never want to sell this place.” She also liked the backstory: “Maston was buddies with Lautner and Neutra, and they’d all go to Musso & Frank’s together because there was a hostess that they were all in love with. Carl ended up marrying her, and this was the house they lived in.” (A more recent previous owner was producer Ryan Murphy.)

Actress Dakota Johnson, wearing a Ryan Roche dress, stands in a living room doorway with her dog, Zeppelin. Vintage lamp on custom sideboard by Pierce & Ward. Fashion styling by Kate Young.

The kitchen cabinetry is painted in Benjamin Moore’s Alligator Alley. Range, hood, and dishwasher by Viking; refrigerator by Sub-Zero; antique 
Persian rug.

If there’s one thing Johnson is familiar with, it’s fascinating Hollywood provenances. Her mother is actress Melanie Griffith, who is the daughter of famous Hitchcock heroine Tippi Hedren. Johnson’s father is the actor Don Johnson, who married Griffith twice (once in 1976 and again in 1989), and Spanish actor Antonio Banderas became her stepfather when she was six. (Griffith and Banderas divorced in 2015.)

Johnson was born in Austin, where her father was making a film, but essentially grew up on movie sets. When her parents separated, she started splitting her time between their homes. Indeed, Johnson’s childhood was defined by being on the road: She remembers delivering an Easter basket to Madonna in 1996, when Banderas was filming Evita in Budapest.

The home opens onto a lap pool in the garden. Stone table and stools from Nickey Kehoe; other seating is vintage.

As a kid, Johnson says, she enjoyed “the gypsy lifestyle.” And now, as an in-demand actress herself, she dips into it when working. (She is currently in a relationship with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, who knows a thing or two about life on the road too.) However, she admits one reason the first major purchase she made with her salary from the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which she started filming when she was 24, was a place to put down roots: “I thought it would be healthy to have a base,” she says. “And, at the very least, have one place where you know your stuff is, as opposed to 10 places.”