InStyle Home: "Hanging With Mariah"

She climbed her way back to the top of the pop charts, but nothing's more satisfying to Mariah Carey than coming home to her penthouse pad in Manhattan.

It would be difficult to describe the past year as anything short of a triumph for Mariah Carey. Her album The Emancipation of Mimi was the best-selling CD of 2005, won her three Grammys (she now has five), and helped the 37-year-old singer tie Elvis for the second most number-one singles (17) of all time. But Carey also staged a miraculous comeback on the domestic front: overhauling her 12,000-square-foot Manhattan triplex after a water tower burst, soaking much of her elaborately hand-painted, antiques-laden, chandelier-strung abode.

"Everything was perfect and then - whammo! Talk about a leak!" says Carey's interior designer, the renowned N.Y.C. decorator Mario Buatta. "All the furniture had to be taken out and put into storage, every wall had to be repainted, the baseboards had to be ripped out - the place had to be completely redone. It was a nightmare."

A garden-variety superstar might have lost her cool, but Carey, who rented a house in Bel-Air while the damage was being repaired, didn't get all worked up over the matter. After a few difficult years she's in a good place - literally and figuratively - and on this balmy March evening she's utterly relaxed in her newly dressed-up digs, despite being more than an hour late for a flight to L.A. The plane isn't going anywhere without her, though: It belongs to movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who sent it to fly her to his Oscar party, at which she has agreed to perform. "Remember, Mariah, it's not your plane," her personal assistant anxiously reminds her. "Oh, right," Carey replies nonchalantly. "I forgot."