“When I was a little girl, my dad used to skin-dive off Palos Verdes, where there were these wonderfully warm and inviting Spanish colonial houses” recalls Diane Keaton. 2I remember being so taken by the graciousness of that indoor-outdoor living, the heat, that beautiful sun. Every aspect of that romantic myth of California appealed to me. As I got older, I further romanticized it…it lives on.”

Indeed - and smack in the middle of Bel-Air no less. But then, Diane Keaton has always been a gal who likes creating things from scratch: characters, movies, books, houses-especially those she fell in love with during a California childhood memorable for trips to Hearst Castle and Mission San Juan Capistrano. “Those places were magical”, she says. “Though, like everybody else, we lived in a Cliff May rip-off ranch house, my father was always hunting out new homes, trying invest in real estate. Some of my fondest memories are of going with him to open houses, looking at them, feeling the wonder of it all.”

Three years ago Keaton focused that sense of wonder on an acre of land, reminiscent of those familiar outings - “a very simple house with walls high enough that it felt like a mission. I loved its shape, how it sat on the property, that it was centered around a courtyard,” or rather the “beginnings” of one, according to designer Stephen Shadley, whose 30-year friendship with the actress has yield collaboration on four of her homes (see Architectural Digest, April 1998 and July 1999). “I was so depressed when I first looked at that house” he laughs. “It’d been remodeled and refashioned so much, there was no sense of the vintage Spanish colonial it once was. It had no magic of its own. I said, ‘This is going to be a lot of work’, “ which was fine by Keaton, who “liked the bareness of detail because I could change it. I don’t get ideas right away-drawings means nothing-only being in the space helps me redefine it. This wasn’t a blank page. I have to work with something that exists, but there was a lot for me to do.”

And the ever-game actress was up for it. “Diane prepared for this as for a film,” says Shadley, “collecting photos, visual images, ideas in a loose-leaf binder, subdivided by room, that we constantly referred to.”

Those references came in handy-especially when massive bedroom and kitchen restructuring required ceilings to be lifted, walls felled. Initially, the three upstairs bedrooms were meant to stay intact as "a separate place where I could be close to the kids, which is really important," she says, referring to eight-year-old daughter Dexter and four-year-old son Duke. "And since my bedroom wasn't the important room, I didn't care how big it was"—until it hit her that "as long as I'm doing such a big project, why not extend the upper story and add a balcony to create a master suite."

Equally complicated were the kitchen's three small, dark, oddball rooms now transformed into a spacious kitchen/family room combo featuring an enormous skylight as well as a fireplace with a hearth of dazzlingly colorful California tiles. "I'd always steered clear of color," she says, "because I don't know how to utilize it"—until, one day at a swap meet, eyeing the ubiquitous "California tile tables, going for $200 a pop, I thought, Wouldn't it be interesting to tear them apart and make a huge bar in the kitchen—which extended itself to the fireplace, cabana and pool tiles. I bought up every tile in town," she says with a laugh.

The house's capacious living room meanwhile—even in its native state-offered its own special appeal. "The living room was always that room off to the left that was rarely used," she says, "whereas this was one you couldn't avoid." Adds Shadley: "Because you walk through it to get to the library and bedrooms, it was more passage than destination; it had a life. So we decided to treat it like a waiting room in a train station, with tiled wainscoting and iron-and-mica chandeliers"—the same light fixtures, in varying scales, used throughout. "Diane loves continuity, so you take a couple tricks and run. with them, creating one big, moving space rather than different rooms with different personalities."

Equally consistent is Keaton's impressive array of Monterey furniture—the fruit of years of collecting pieces that spoke to her obsession with "the lifestyle that started in early-20th-century California. I take pride in being part of saving our history", she explains. "California is a repository of starlingly unusual dwellings, every significant architect built a private home here, making the state a history of architecture in the 20th century".

Her obsession with that lineage abounds: the beguiling Catalina and Bauer pots; the giant Hillside Pottery concrete vessels inlaid with California tiles ;and, of course, the art -the sweeping desert landscapes of Maynard Dixon ,Frank Tenney Johnson Edgar Payne, Carl Oscar Borg.

Even with the landscaping, she was unflinching in her mission, as it were, eschewing concrete in favour on the rough ,golden beauty of decomposed granite, “like a dirt road but more reinforced-what you see walking into a mission. Everybody said, “Don’t do DG, it's sloppy. If women are in heels, they’ll get dirty " I said "No worry there; that’s not me".

What is Diane Keaton, however, is this gloriously original version of her own Capistrano. "How do I feel living here? Secure," she muses "I feel safe. Because the house is wrapped around a courtyard, there’s a core that everything comes off of, making you feel somehow protected and walled in by the shape of the house. Everything looks inward ,which is actually very soothing. It's like you're creating your own home" she pauses, “your own world".