The Importance Of Being Martha

SHE STARTED A HOME-EC RENAISSANCE, BUILT A MEDIA EMPIRE AND TAUGHT SNOOP HOW TO MAKE BROWNIES. SHE IS MARTHA STEWART, AND SHE’S STILL AS INFLUENTIAL AS EVER. 

- Lauren Johnson

On a recent fall morning,

Martha Stewart’s New York offices look quintessentially like, well, Martha Stewart. Ensconced in Manhattan’s historic Starrett-Lehigh Building, a former freight terminal with soaring ceilings and eight miles of towering glass windows, the sun-drenched headquarters of the doyenne of domestic arts are as attractive and meticulous as one would expect. Rows of magazines fan out neatly on a coffee table, cookbooks stand like sentries in a nearby cabinet and staffers shuttle professional cooking equipment into the on-site test kitchen.

It’s not just a clean, well-lighted space; it’s an incomparably busy one. This is, after all, headquarters to Stewart’s sprawling media empire. Everything that will bear the Martha Stewart name gets a careful vetting first, and it gets it here. For more than 30 years, Stewart’s name has been synonymous with good taste in living and entertaining. Indeed, the wonder of Stewart’s empire isn’t so much its size but its diversity. A bona fide living brand, Stewart has put her imprimatur on everything from tooth brushholders to recipes for the perfect soufflé, and on every platform you can name—print, books, television, the web—somehow, the whole time, without making the brand itself seem overextended.

“It just proves that the omnimedia model, which we pioneered way back in 1989, really did work,” Stewart says. “The consolidation of the magazine world, the print world, the books, the television, the merchandising and the internet— all of those things actually did go together despite a lot of naysayers who didn’t think that they would.”