ARCHDIGEST.COM 87
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.)
If there’s one thing Johnson is familiar with, it’s fascinat-
ing 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.
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.”
Johnson does have a lot of stuff, especially for someone
who only recently turned 30. “I guess I’ve had a big life already,”
she says, shrugging. On a single shelf in her ground-floor
office, she has the following framed memorabilia: a seating card
Patti Smith gave her with her phone number on it; a photo-
graph of writer Hunter S. Thompson, who was a close friend
of her father’s; a note from Hedren signed, “Love, Mormor,”
“THIS IS THE
FRONT DOOR,”
