Designing Drew

After a lifetime spent playing other people, Drew Barrymore has created a new career and a home line-based on being herself.

- By Jenny Comita

Drew Barrymore can pinpoint the very moment she became "totally obsessed. by her own admission, with home design. It was 2001, and she was sitting on the floor of the woodpaneled living room of her Montecito, CA, house, staring at the lone object in the space: a deeply uninspiring metal desk. Earlier that year, she'd lost most of her possessions which, she says, included a sizable record collection but very little furniturein a fire at her previous place in Los Angeles. For months, she'd been camping out in her new abode with next to nothing. "It was bare walls, bare floors. I didn't have a can opener. I didn't have a bedsheet," she says. "That day, I looked around my empty living room and thought, OK, this is getting really depressing. I have got to become a homemaker."

And boy, has she ever. After spending nearly 20 years wallpapering, painting, and furnishing her West Coast home to eclectically layered perfection, Drew now lives in a sunny, art-filled apartment in Manhattan with her two daughters, Olive, 10, and Frankie, 9-plus four cats, two dogs, and an occasionally free-ranging bearded dragon lizard named Jeremy. The family relocated to be closer to the girls' grandparents and cousins. Their father, Drew's ex-husband Will Kopelman, is a native New Yorker.