Invincible Charmed

Invincible Charmed

An article about Holly Marie in InStyle

Holly Marie Combs may be many things -- attractive, quirky, preternaturally mature -- but hasty she's not. When she began the search for her first home, George Bush was President. By the time she had finished, in 1995, Bill Clinton was firmly entrenched on Pennsylvania Avenue and Combs had staked her own claim to a more playful address in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. "I was one of those people who are constantly looking for a house to buy," says the actress of her four-year pursuit. "I looked and looked. It became a hobby."

Perched on a wooden chair in her sunny, minimally furnished spare room, Combs seems a provocative blend of caution and audacity, a young woman who knows both when to take her time and when to seize the day.

The 25-year-old actress now plays Piper Halliwell on the WB's Charmed, the most girl-next-doorsy member of a troika of good witches, but she actually first spotted her fifties ranch house while appearing as the precocious teen Kimberly Brock on the Emmy-winning Picket Fences. And when browsing turned to buying, the backyard was the deciding factor -- not because she fancied the pool or the Jacuzzi, but because it had a huge kennel, perfect for her dogs. "There is all this space for them to run around in," Combs says. An ardent animal lover, she currently has two pooches, Lola, who at 5 months is still a puppy, and Travis, a German shepherd. She also owns two quarter horses, Jesse and Jake (which she keeps at the nearby equestrian center), along with two cats, four lovebirds and two physically challenged hamsters. "One only has three legs, and the other one's really fat," she says with a giggle.

Settling in the Valley -- by L.A. standards, a fairly affordable area -- appealed to Combs's scrupulous side. "When I was growing up, my family didn't have a lot of money, so they instilled in me a belief in saving and saving and not living extravagantly." Still, Combs says, "I was very nervous. I wanted my payments to be normal, nothing toohigh, so that if I never worked again I could maintain them. My house is small, but it's cute."

While she may have shown a conservative streak in buying the two-bedroom house, she has been anything but when it comes to decorating. "With every job I land, I remodel," says Combs, a TV-move veteran. "I redid the pool, front porch and driveway, installed the gate, and did a ton of landscaping." She painted the interiro herself, leaning toward cream, gray and muted shades of green. The actress has also gone through numerous phases of decorating -- and redecorating; she's currently in the midst of an indoor-plant phase, but she has left many other enthusiasms in her wake. "For a long time, I went through this red phase, where I had a deep red couch and red tables. The red armoire in my bedroom is a leftover from that phase. I went through a huge basket phase for a while, so there are probably about 10 baskets in the garage, aside from the ones in the house." At other times, she embraced lanterns, candlesticks -- and angels ("like everybody else").

Combs offers a theory about her habitual yen to redo her décor. "I think that because this is the first house I've lived in for such a long time, and I can't just pick up and move, I [like to] make it look different. I'm constantly rearranging. I come home and start pushing the couch around. And my fianc� is like, 'What are you doing? It looked fine the way it was!'"

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