escape from

new york

BY AMANDA RUDOLPH | PHOTOGRAPHED BY ART STREIBER

"There's no commitment. It's just for the summer," says Kristin Davis. "All the girls have one, and really, it keeps you sane." That's the kind of coolly tantalizing talk you'd expect from a member in good standing of the most carnally cranked-up cabal of women in TV history. But this isn't Sex and the City, and Davis, who plays Charlotte, the prude of the bunch (and that's not saying much), isn't referring to her latest male quarry. She's talking about her summer rental. Even though it's a catch—a house in the fashionable Hamptons, on Long Island's east end—it's just a fling she's having while in New York wrapping up the third season of Sex, HBO's unblushing hit. Her big love is back in Los Angeles, pocketed in a breezy Brentwood canyon, worlds away from the urban playground of Manhattan. "I miss my house so much! Any chance I get to come home, I jump at," says Davis, looking more like a sweet schoolgirl than a seductress in jeans, a pink T-shirt and a ponytail.
     Sprawled on a plump cream-colored sofa in her split-level, modern-meets-mountain-retreat house, Davis, 35, is exactly where she wants to be. Since she bought the place, just two weeks before heading to New York for Sex's first season, she's been commuting cross-country. But what's a girl to do when she finds a keeper? "I walked in and knew I had to have it," she recalls. "I loved that it was at the end of the road, so quiet." Not that Kristin, a semi-reformed Martha Stewart enthusiast, didn't have to see past the potbellied stove and garish walls. "The kitchen was bright purple and yellow," she says, wincing, "but I liked the structure, the bones, the way it was situated." All it needed was some toning down, which she accomplished with a warm, muted palette that lent the place a sense of tranquility.
     Now, she says, "I've come to love it." So much so that when she's in Los Angeles, she rarely leaves the house. "She's a homebody," says her mother, Dorothy, a data analyst at the University of South Carolina, who lets slip that, unlike the gadabout girlfriends on Sex, Kristin loves hanging out in her own kitchen. (Her specialty: butter cookies dipped in chocolate.) "It's all true," says Davis. "It's kind of why I like Los Angeles. New York is built around going out, while L.A. is built around staying home." She spends her downtime hiking, doing yoga, renting movies, and hanging with Callie, a golden retriever that seems to worship the earth-tone carpet Kristin walks on. "When I'm here, my lawn is green, I take care of my orchids, and my African violets look great," she says, gazing intently at a butterfly the way Charlotte might eye a passing tray of cosmopolitans.
     Somehow this snapshot of a domesticated Kristin feels almost like a betrayal. Here's the sassy Sex girl, but you've got to wonder, Where are her martini glasses? The boxes of Jimmy Choo shoes? Instead there are books on the Dalai Lama scattered about and Macy Gray making mellow in the background. Then, on a tour of her bedroom, evidence of fashion-itis emerges. There's the sequined Tod's bag on the hamper—and isn't that a Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt on the floor? Suddenly the woman who just seconds before characterized her style as anything that doesn't make her feet hurt is talking animatedly about a recent shopping jaunt in New York. That day, Davis popped into Manolo Blahnik, where she was supposed to pick one pair to put on hold for the Sex costume designer to look at. In true Sex and the City fashion, she chose three. "We all have a shoe fetish," she says. "Well, at least [co-star] Sarah Jessica [Parker] and I do."
     Madison Avenue must seem a long way from Columbia, S.C., where Kristin spent her formative and teenage years with her mom; her adoptive father, Keith, a college professor; and three stepsisters. (Kristin, who was born in Boulder, Colo. was 2 when her parents divorced.) "I'm lucky, in a sense, because my family didn't have such a lot of money," she says, aware of the perils of an indulgent upbringing: Instead of shiny new possessions, there were treasures from her mother's family, including a wooden bird carved by her bohemian great-great-aunt that now hangs in her guest bathroom. "Back then everyone had solid furniture," she says, "and my mom's house is filled with stuff that came over on the boat." But if the décor was old-fashioned, the attitude was anything but, recalls Kristin, whose parents toed a progressive line. "We always had Ms. magazine on the table."
     Davis hit the stage at age 10, when Dorothy nudged her into auditioning for a production of Snow White and she snared the part of a lady-in-waiting. After high school, she played actress-in-waiting attending Rutgers University in New Jersey, then working as a waitress and at various odd jobs (florist was a favorite) until she finally cracked Hollywood—her big break was the role of bitchy Brooke Armstrong on Melrose Place (produced by Sex and the City creator Darren Star). Last year she teamed with Rob Lowe in the NBC movie Atomic Train and, more recently, portrayed Annie Denver in Take Me Home: The John Denver Story. She has just wrapped an HBO thriller, Blacktop, and is currently developing her own material.
     While Melrose was steamy (and sudsy), it didn't prepare Davis for Sex and its you-can't-do-that-on-network-TV shockers, including a scene in the first season that called for Charlotte to back out of an extremely compromising position in the bedroom. "I think it was kind of jumping off a ledge for Kristin to do a scene like that," says Star. "But she always comes through and she's always funny." Her parents haven't viewed that episode; it's one of two she has forbidden them to see. Her late grandmother, Ruth, didn't even know the name of the show. "She'd say, 'What are you doing, again?' and I'd say, 'A comedy,'" reports Kristin. "I thought the name would throw her off."
     Neither the name nor the theme of the show throws Kristen, who says that for all of Sex's equal-opportunity lasciviousness, her own criteria for choosing a good man haven't changed. "Intelligence and humor would be at the top," she says without hesitation. "I like men who do yoga, because they're usually more open to things. I like men who own dogs, partly because you have to be responsible for them. I like quirky things, offbeat guys. I like men who wear glasses." Recently she has been steadily dating an actor, but, unlike her chatty alter ego, she demurs, "It hasn't been that long, and talking now seems like putting a curse on it." Besides, she has to take the slightly weary, actress-living-on-planes stance, a fitting if cruel fate for one of the stars of a show about the travails of "getting it." "It's harder for me to meet men because all I do is work," insists Davis. "I live here. I work there. I did a project in Canada on my time off. What city am I supposed to date people in?" Now is that a genuine cry of despair? Or a spin-off waiting to happen?