Nothing beats the “Hollywood” sign as a totem of human ambition. Surprising, then, that Lake Hollywood estate — the upmarket residential district at its feet, bounded to the south by the silver streak of Hollywood Lake Reservoir — manages to be so inconspicuous. A 10-minute drive up a sun-baked switchback from the brazen neon of Hollywood Boulevard, this is another Los Angeles entirely: a bucolic habitat of oak woodland and sage scrub where A-list residents live incognito, with deer, mountain lions and the occasional coyote as neighbours.

The rural ambience suits Alex Kingston. The British actress has lived on the Hill since 2000, when she and her second husband, the German writer Florian Haertel, moved into a property they had bought on the estate two years earlier. “It’s the dream life,” muses Kingston, 46, over coffee and pastries on her lavender-scented garden terrace, “but I’d always imagined myself in a damp English farmhouse, surrounded by children. Yet here I am, living the American dream, with one child and a couple of great big dogs."

Her American dream began in 1997, when, after the break-up of her first marriage to Ralph Fiennes, she arrived in the City of Angels with a healthy portfolio of British television, theatre and film work — and a dream gig as the British surgeon Elizabeth Corday in the hit NBC medical drama ER.

“I hated it here at first,” she says. “I remember calling my mother in tears about the uniform architecture and lack of culture, which, of course, sounds a little precious now.”

Before long, though, Kingston began to appreciate the LA lifestyle, taking off on road trips to explore the Californian countryside with Haertel, whom she met in late 1997 when mutual friends set them up on a blind date. “I reprogrammed my expectations of LA,” she says. “Florian and I sought out nature and, suddenly, I began to feel at peace here.”

Capturing the feel of the easy, outdoorsy California they’d fallen for was one of the couple’s priorities as they set about the ambitious project of remodelling a 1960s show bungalow they’d bought on the estate. “There’s something here called a ‘California remodel’,” Kingston says. “It’s a brilliant quirk of planning law that allows you to keep your property tax banding and your electricity and sewage hooked up. All you need to do is retain one internal wall and the chimney stack.”

The project sounded simple and, full of idealism, they commissioned an experienced building contractor and teamed him up with a spunky young architect. “In our naivety, we thought that it would be an interesting combination,” Kingston recalls. “An experienced man in his sixties mentoring a young guy with great ideas... How wrong we were!”

Eighteen months later, and with contractor and architect at loggerheads, the project had stumbled to an impasse. “The contractor called the architect a young upstart, the architect refused to talk to the contractor. It was a complete mess.”

Luckily, when she and Haertel had chosen their design team, they’d sent hampers of fruit, bread and cheese to those who’d been unsuccessful in their tender. “That stood in our favour when we returned to architect Paul Hinckley with the unappealing prospect of picking up someone else’s botched job,” Kingston says.

And what a botch. “No plan had been put in place for the heating or air- conditioning systems — the architect fluffed something about using Manhattan loft-style exposed ductwork — and the foundations, the only part of the property as yet completed, had been laid down unevenly: in a 3½in tidal wave. Jackhammering it all would have been too expensive, so we were pretty much stuck with it.”

Not the best moment, then, for Kingston to fall pregnant. “In retrospect, it has a comedic ring,” she says. “In the middle of all of this stress and building dust, after a grinding slog on IVF, and I’m pregnant . To pile on the stress, I’d invited the extended family over from Europe for Christmas, thinking we’d be in the house for the summer of 2000 by the latest. So we had a very rustic time of it, with a half-finished house and one functioning toilet.”

By the time Salome was born, in 2001, the property was on its way to becoming a family home. Hinckley reworked the plans for a Spanish-style villa into a European-influenced modern Californian house, with a focus on openness and interconnected living spaces.

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