Catherine Zeta-Jones was standing at the top of a staircase in a penthouse at New York City’s London hotel. Long dark hair tucked behind her shoulders, glittering bracelets at her wrists, she motioned me to come through into a room that overlooked Central Park. She sat, opened the curtain, glanced out the window, and marveled over the view and the extravagance of the room. It was an opulently decorated room but, like any hotel, impersonal. It cried out for throw pillows, comforting bedding, the perfect lace table cloths. On the penthouse’s ground floor were exactly those things, pieces from her new home collection, Casa Zeta-Jones, which will launch September 28 and will be available online through QVC.

Zeta-Jones says she’s had the decorating bug since she was a small girl, when she would watch her mother sew all her clothes and drapes. Now an Oscar winner and part of one of Hollywood’s most influential families—she and Michael Douglas have been married for nearly 17 years—Zeta-Jones uses decoration to create her own cozy world.

“No one really knows what goes on in my four walls,” she says in her elegant Welsh accent. “My husband and I have been in the public eye for many, many, many years. So, when we go out, we put the Michael Douglas-Catherine Zeta-Jones armor on every now and again. But when we go home—you know, I love beautiful things, whatever they are—and I collect from the souks in Istanbul. I’ve been to India, to South Africa. Handmade pieces, woven baskets. It comes home.”

But “home” for Zeta-Jones is, unsurprisingly, not like it is for most people. Her father-in-law Kirk Douglas, now 100 years old and star of classic Hollywood films like Spartacus and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is there with stories upon stories—including some that helped Zeta-Jones with her latest work. When she agreed to play Olivia de Havilland for FX’s Emmy-nominated Feud earlier this year, Kirk was right there for research help.

“He was there,” she says. “He was the biggest star at the time. . . . He said something really interesting: he said, ‘Let me tell you, there were hundreds of Bette and Joan feuds, theirs was just the most famous.’ The pressure for the women, it was really hard. It was in and out of favor; you were corralled in a stable. Who was the prettiest? Who was the most box-office worthy? You were pigeonholed, the blonde, the blonde, the brunettes.”

(De Havilland is now suing FX over her portrayal on Feud, and her lawsuit has been fast-tracked by California courts. Zeta-Jones is diplomatic about the case. “It’s hard for me to comment on, because she’s not suing me. If she was suing me? I’d be talking all about it. She’s suing FX; it’s nothing to do with me. I just loved getting to play her, and I respect her wholeheartedly and really admire her as an actor.”)

Story time with Kirk, or “pappy” as the Douglas’s two teenagers call him, is normal around casa Zeta-Jones/Douglas.

“As people see me and Michael or Kirk in our world, I see them in my world—our world, our capsule,” she says. “I see them as us. We are a very, very, very close family; we share everything . . . From there, from those four walls of security, I can go out there and be Catherine Zeta-Jones and be Wonder Woman and take bullets off my boobies and then go and cry in my home and have love and support around me.”