Brad Keeler, a building contractor, levelled off the haphazard foundations with epoxy resin, and Hinckley compensated for the previous architect’s poor planning with quirky design features, such as the lowered ceiling in the downstairs yoga room, made of concentric wooden circles and concealing the air-conditioning unit.

“The materials were particularly important to us,” Kingston says. “We wanted to bring outdoors in, with plenty of wood and stone. Initially, we’d thought of a Hispanic tiled roof, but we decided aluminium would be more in keeping — it’s inexpensive and durable, and works with the laid-back Californian look.”

The most prominent of these natural materials is douglas fir, a warm wood that’s a signature throughout the house: framing the full glass doors that open onto the terrace and pool, and sweeping across the ceiling of the main living space, giving the ground floor a nautical feel.

In retrospect, Kingston would have planned certain features differently with a child in mind. The pool and bath hemming the garden are a couple of steps from the patio doors, flush with the living space and finished in stone, rather than the common aquamarine tiling, to resemble a natural pond by nightfall. “If I’d thought I had any chance of conceiving, I’d have tucked the pool to the left of the house, where my vegetable garden is now,” Kingston says. “As it was, we had to ring our beautiful natural pool with an ugly plastic fence. And Salome, of course, had to learn to swim — fast.”

The layout presented another problem. The couple’s bedroom is on the first floor, with the second and guest bedrooms downstairs, at the opposite end of the house from the staircase. “Salome is the sort of personality who needs to feel secure of our presence,” Kingston says. “Even now, the only way she’ll sleep on her own downstairs is if both dogs are with her.”

On “girls’ nights”, when Haertel is out of town for work, all four females — Alex and Salome, mild-mannered Lulu (a St Bernard/lab cross) and frisky Daisy (doberman/Italian greyhound) — pile onto the bed in the master bedroom, with its views up into the hills and out over the lake and drowsy city.

The vegetable garden is one of Kingston’s favourite spots, and gardening is a passion she’s trying to foster in Salome. “I’m filming a lot at the moment , so this isn’t a year for bumper crops,” she says. “Root vegetables are tricky, especially carrots, but the soil here works well for heirloom tomatoes, and I’ve grown some great broccoli and cauliflowers — although Florian often forgets and buys them from the supermarket anyway.”

Fig season is a highlight. “We’ll pick from the tree and stuff them with blue cheese and prosciutto,” Kingston says. “Our neighbours ask for the leaves to bake around black cod.”

The outdoor pizza oven, installed to the left of the terrace, is perfect for the alfresco entertaining that is such a part of southern Californian living. One memorable incident involved using it to try to cook a 6ft salmon for Easter

Sunday last year. “After a series of calamities, I ended up with half a monster fish hanging out of the jammed oven door,” Kingston laughs. “I just stuffed it in as far as I could and hoped for the best. And you know what? The heat conducted down the fish and it cooked beautifully.”

Despite having embraced the American life, Kingston, raised in Surrey as the daughter of a British butcher and his German wife, says she feels more European as she grows older. The couple’s second home, in the Austrian Alps, is an intentional counterpoint to LA living. They remodelled their property there, stripping a chalet back to its skeleton and reworking it in classic local style, “though it was much quicker, thanks to Austrian craftsmanship”.

“In Austria, Salome gets to see where milk comes from and witness nature in its unanaesthetised glory,” Kingston says. “And there are four seasons, which is something I really miss in LA — over here, there’s no sense of a year spent or another one coming.” For that reason, she also feels nostalgic for the country of her birth. “That peculiar mossy, mulchy smell of a British autumn is one thing I really miss,” she says. “That and kedgeree.”

One reminder of home was essential in Kingston’s design plan for LA — a bath. “The American walk-in wardrobe I’ve really taken to,” she says, “but shower society I’ll never understand. All the showers we looked at had that weird shallow half-bath at their feet, so I simply had to install a classic deep, curved-lip bath in the bedroom.”

Kingston’s tub with a view certainly beats a frosted perspective over rainy rooftops: “I can lie back in my big British bathtub and look up the hills to the Hollywood sign,” she smiles. “Now it doesn’t get much better than that, does it?”

- Alex Kingston stars in the drama Hope Springs, which starts tonight on BBC1

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