Kim Cattrall was a renter. She was 41 when she was cast as Samantha Jones on Sex and the City. And it was that same year she picked up her first property, a Hamptons beach house. Years later, as the hit HBO show was approaching its end, her main residence remained an Upper East Side one bedroom full of mismatched furniture, she once told AD.
“It’s not that I lived in dumps,” she said. “[Buying property] just was never a priority.” Eventually, though, she invested in a luxury apartment located on NYC’s ritzy Park Avenue, and later she’d pick up a stunning residence on Vancouver Island. Cattrall has also rented in London and Liverpool, where she was born, at various points throughout the 2000s while performing on the West End and at the Liverpool Playhouse. (In 2005, the Chelsea, London, flat she shared with a friend was reportedly burgled while she was onstage.)
Below, get a glimpse into three of the pads that the Filthy Rich star has called her own over the years.
1998
Cattrall had already been living and working in New York City for more than 25 years when she was cast as Samantha on Darren Star’s racy new HBO series Sex and the City. That same year, she dropped $450,000 for a one-story waterfront cottage in East Hampton, a place she considered her getaway from the bustle of city life. The property, situated along Gardiner’s Bay, comprised a two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom main house measuring 1,232 square feet and a 336-square-foot detached studio with its own half bath. Inside the main house, oversized windows in the L-shaped great room overlooked the bay, with a wood-burning fireplace anchoring the formal dining and living areas. A motorized 59-by-80-inch movie screen and projector converted the space into a luxurious home theater, and a loft above the great room with its own walk-in closet and two skylights offered a unique sleeping space for the more adventurous (the loft was only accessible via a tall wooden ladder).
“I always wanted a quiet beachfront home outside the glam,” she told The New York Times, “a home that would be restorative and simple to maintain, where I could have privacy, relax, and decompress. My home has been my sanctuary.” It was there that the actor penned all three of her books, where she married her ex-husband Mark Levinson, and where she spent 22 years before listing the home for $3.25 million in 2020 and selling it for $2.9 million shortly thereafter.
2003
Just as her time on Sex and the City was drawing to a close, Cattrall fell in love with a 1929 Park Avenue building by Emery Roth featuring high ceilings, marble floors, and long mirrored hallways in the lobby. (At the time, she’d still been living in a tiny one-bedroom on the Upper East Side.) She snapped up a two-bedroom apartment there for a reported $1.675 million and went to work gussying up the pad to her liking. The actor worked with her friend Manhattan-based interior designer Tony Ingrao to dream up what the unit could be: “Spacious enough for big parties but still intimate and comfortable for when she was alone,” Ingrao told AD. He and Cattrall took inspiration from Old Hollywood glamour, outfitting the apartment with art and antiques from Paris, London, Italy, and Austria to match the contemporary classical design of the space itself, with its ornate moldings and marble floors.
“Before this, I had understood fashion as art, but furniture was more functional to me,” Cattrall told AD. “I came to see these pieces as art too. It gave me so much pleasure to bring such history and dimension to my living space.” As a token of appreciation to Ingrao and a nod to their friendship, the pair also decided to turn the second bedroom into “the monkey room,” outfitting it with lots of monkey decor and framed artwork to honor their birth year, 1956, the year of the monkey. Cattrall still owns this home.
2014
It would be more than 10 years before Cattrall decided to make another substantial real estate purchase, this time on the east coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, where she spent her childhood. The actor paid an undisclosed amount for the waterfront house, where she currently resides with her partner, Russell Thomas. “We are now spending more time there close to my mum and family,” she told The New York Times in 2020. (She grew up on Vancouver Island and attended school there before moving to New York City to pursue acting in the early ’70s.) “I’m coming home again,” she told People. “The mountains, the orcas, when I was a teenager I didn’t appreciate it. But now, they’re bringing me back.”
Details of the property are scant, but Cattrall did offer a glimpse into the magic of her daily life by sharing a brief video clip of a pod of orca whales swimming by her backyard in 2021. “Back yard,” she captioned the post. “Front seat.” Cattrall still owns this home and considers it her primary property.
