DREW’S DESIGN LAB:
For the first time, the Rebel Homemaker opens the doors to her own home. Tucked among the trees of Upstate New York, it’s a living design laboratory—where Drew Barrymore’s lifelong love of interiors comes fully into view.

Though she appears in millions of living rooms each weekday via her hit talk show, Drew Barrymore has long been careful about inviting the world into her own. A study in contrasts, she has lived much of her life in the public eye while fiercely guarding her privacy. She is both the glamorous movie star born into a storied Hollywood dynasty—booking her first role at just 11 months old—and a devoted homebody, happiest in her favorite sweatpants, with kids and pets nearby, poring over the dog-eared pages of design books and magazines. And then, with joyful persistence, she brings those discoveries to life.

Though her primary residence is in New York City, Drew found herself craving a connection to nature—one that echoed her California roots. Curled up on her favorite sofa in the sunroom of her Upstate New York house, she tells Danny Seo—our publisher, and her friend and a member of the show’s iconic Drew’s Crew—that she’d been scrolling Zillow for some time when she stumbled upon this diamond in the rough. “I had desperately wanted a place outside the city because I had been working for years at this point inside of a studio with no windows,” she recalls. “I’m from California and I just had this urge to find nature.”

Her search stretched far and wide, but always within a reasonable commute to the city. “I came here and I walked around and I was like, I swear my family has been in this house,” Drew says. “I don’t think I’m super woo-woo, but I had this really strong sense and feeling.”

What first charmed her was the home’s unexpected, almost puzzle-like layout—winding hallways and rooms that revealed themselves slowly, where you least expected them. “I’m really into odd formations and the bones of the house,” she shares. “I didn’t know that’s what they were called when I first started renovating houses. I like the bones.”

She admits that she had no clue what she was actually in for. “I thought it was paint and wallpaper and move in,” she laughs. “I had no idea what I was undertaking.” First, some of the lot—previously dense, wet forest—was cleared to let in the light. She then spent a year and a half devoted solely to the house’s infrastructure—updating HVAC, electrical, and plumbing systems, and installing expansive panes of glass wherever possible.

Next came the fun part: reveling in her design playground come to life. “I spent crazy amounts of hours figuring out how to preserve things. So much of it was experimenting,” she says. “It was very micro—and very macro.” She embraced the messier moments too, recalling times she’d bring friends from the city to camp out in the unfinished house. There was no kitchen, but there was a “weird gas stove,” she tells Danny. “I’ve roughed it in the house many times over.” Today, the home features appliances from ZLINE, a US-based brand with a mission around attainable luxury.

She was utterly immersed in every detail. “It became this obsession of a canvas,” she explains, and she had no shortage of sources to inspire. She cites designers like Amanda Brooks, Leanne Ford, and LA-based firm Pierce & Ward as favorites. And then there are people from her own circle, shaping her very art-forward viewpoint. “My ex-boyfriend Fabrizio Moretti is such an amazing artist, and he used all different materials from all corners of the world,” she recalls. “It taught me that a little piece of thin wire could be turned into something functional or a piece of art. It really helped me look at the world differently.”

As this property took shape, the experimentation took hold. The grand living room went through a few iterations, with Drew living in the space—learning from it—before deciding if it felt “right.” First, the double-height ceilings were painted in a rich olive green, but as winter turned to spring, it proved to be entirely too much green when the foliage returned outside. “It was like this weird green terrarium,” she says. “I felt like a lizard in there.”

Next came a romantic rose hue, with light pink trim punctuating the tall window frames. “I’m not actually sure why I ended up changing that, because it was so amazing,” Drew admits. “But it just became this play place for me. I ended up with this Gustavian, Finnish, sort of serene space with light gray and painted floors. I really wanted big, bold things, but with a bit of breathing room.”

The living room, along with her bedroom, are now two of her favorite spaces in the house. “They don’t have a ton of color, but they don’t feel like a white box,” she notes. “I really feel like a little bit of trim can elevate and make a room look so much more expensive without spending a lot of money. A little bit of hardware or minimalist accents that catch your eye—those things make it go from feeling manufactured and mass produced, to something that really feels found and elevated. I don’t spend a lot of money on things. That’s not my style. But I was like, how can I make this house look expensive without having true expensive antiques around?”

Almost none of the furniture is new—not just in origin, but in her life. Almost everything came with her to New York from California years ago but looks at home here thanks to her love of textiles and the ability to make an old-favorite sofa look new. The two brown sofas in the den came from her LA living room, recovered for a second life. “I bought very little furniture for this house,” she shares. “This is what I had, and I reworked it.” She reflects on spending weekends at Manhattan’s Decoration & Design Building, obsessing over fabrics, and editing, and editing some more, until she was certain she’d made the right selection.

It really embodies her “rebel homemaker” approach—the title of her 2021 book. “The reason I came up with that name is because whenever I would look at the definition of homemaker, I would say 99 out of 100 dictionaries have a very archaic look at homemaker,” she says. “It’s from a very different era. And I don’t think it represents what it is when people really love to make homes.”

Her appreciation of interiors and architecture and home is rooted in her endless love of learning—both how she can improve her own life and make it beautiful as she goes. “I’ve been studying a lot,” she reveals, “for example, about the importance of 20 minutes of sunlight in the morning—which is a big challenge living on an island with tall buildings or working in a windowless studio. Nature is my healer and my teacher. That’s what I’m in search of, to find how I can balance that through design.”

For those in a similar pursuit, Drew is your biggest cheerleader. “You can make anything you see in a magazine, that you fall in love with, happen in your home,” she says, with trademark Drew enthusiasm. “It could be a study sheet with like a bunch of different items on it. It could be a room in someone’s house. It could be anything you want, anything you see on Pinterest. You can make it possible. You don’t have the same architecture as that photo, but you can. That’s what I learned here. It was a labor of love. I didn’t know that I could make any fantasy into reality. I cared about each and every single corner, and there’s quite a few corners in here.”

DREW’S DESIGN NOTEBOOK + THE COLLABORATORS THAT HELPED HER ACHIEVE THE 3-YEAR RENOVATION:
Mark Turner, Turner and Turner Painting
Christina Nielsen, Christina Nielsen Design
Cheryl & Lee Demers
Carlos Cadena, Ale & C Contractor
Freddy Segovia, Segovias Wood Work Corp. 
Edwin Medina, E.M Quality Interiors
Martha Baker Landscape Design