…Fran Drescher started house hunting far from New York (where she still keeps an apartment to be close to family) and soon found her Shangri-La on the California coast.

“I was still in a lot of pain from my marriage and I needed security,” she explains. “I needed the ions from the water. I needed a sanctuary. As soon as I walked into this house I felt it. It has a vortex that is magical.”

Even so, she says that buying her airy three-bedroom, two-story Malibu home was an emotional decision. “This was my first major purchase on my own. It was quite scary but that was the journey I was on: to define myself independently of the marriage and to discover who I am without asking somebody else, ‘What do you think, honey?’”

Drescher’s house is filled with photos of people she loves and places she has traveled, along with handpicked antique furniture and bold artwork, ranging from contemporary abstractions to erotic drawings by Egon Schiele.

“It’s me,” she says simply. “I’m not uptight about refining my home. Sometimes that means clutter and tchotchkes. But it gives me a sense of peace.”