Meet Martha Queen of domesticity talks about ‘Living’ in Maine Summer home in Seal Harbor offers break from New York City

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On a “bitter, bitter cold” morning in Manhattan, Martha Stewart calls from the road. At 9:45, she already has taped two television segments and is en route to her office. Her driver pulls up in front of Sant Ambroeus, a restaurant on Madison Avenue that doesn’t do takeout. She puts down the phone as a waiter comes to the curb and serves her a cappuccino on a silver tray.

This is Martha Stewart. Living.

The living in New York is a little different from in Maine. Here, en route to her summer home in Seal Harbor, she’s more likely to stop in Trenton for a lobster roll. No silver platters. No curbside service.

It’s a good thing.

“Everybody likes to eat lobster,” she says. “The lobster rolls are so delicious.”

Whether she’s talking about crustaceans or crochet, Martha is the undisputed doyenne of domesticity. Starting today, Maine’s most famous homemaker will share her hints for living well in askMartha, which will appear every Tuesday on the Style page. To coincide with her column’s debut, she agreed to an interview about living in Maine.

“I had been going [to Mount Desert Island] for a long, long time, usually staying at places such as the Asticou Inn,” Stewart said. “It’s a place where I find I can have an active vacation, which is what I crave.”

In 1997, she bought Skylands, a 12-bedroom, pink-granite summer “cottage” on 61 acres in Seal Harbor, a village in the town of Mount Desert. Like Turkey Hill, her 1805 farm in Westport, Conn., the mansion built by Edsel Ford in 1925 has become more than a place to live. It’s become a place for Living. As in Martha Stewart Living, the title of both her magazine and television show.

While few Mainers have actually seen Skylands up close – it’s hard to find and even harder to get past the driveway unless you have an invitation – readers of Martha Stewart Living would recognize its gilded mirrors, rough-hewn wood beam ceilings and tidy white kitchen from last September’s decorating issue. Its grounds have served as a backdrop for several holiday layouts and even the bathroom towels starred in an article on making guests feel at home.

While Martha has added her own flourishes to the d?cor, Skylands’ subtle beauty was there long before she moved in.

“I didn’t change one single thing about my house,” she said. “As a piece of artwork my house is an architectural gem.”

The home has inspired a collection of paint, a line of home accessories available through Martha By Mail and a Christmas Eve spread in her 2000 book “Parties and Projects for the Holidays.”

Skylands needs no introduction among Stewart’s legions of followers, the ones who use “Martha” as a noun, verb and adjective: “Those curtains are so Martha.” “She Martha’d the guest room.” “I’m feeling a little Martha today.” Like Turkey Hill, Skylands is just another label in the brand name that is Martha Stewart.

And what a brand name it is. She’s the chairman and CEO of the TV, book, magazine, newspaper, merchandizing and Internet monolith that bears her name, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. But there’s more to Martha the person than Martha the trademark. Sure, she’s wealthier and more organized than most of us. But she’s also funny, enthusiastic, a little reserved at first and remarkably normal. She likes the same things about Maine that everyone likes. She does the same sort of things that everyone does when they go to MDI, she just manages to do more of them in a day.

She hikes. She likes lobster rolls. She gets very excited about birds and seals. She loves to shop for antiques, but she won’t say where. She collects old Maine postcards, books and maps. She even swims in the bracingly cold ocean.

“I try to use whatever we have,” she said.

By “whatever we have,” she means a Hinckley picnic boat, kayaks, the shuffleboard courts on her property or her pool table. She doesn’t buy “toys” just for the sake of having them. She uses them.

“We’re very active and we never sit still. We keep going all the time in the true Maine spirit.”

A typical day here for Martha, even when she’s on vacation, begins at dawn.

“In Maine, I do not stay in bed late,” she said.

Martha doesn’t have curtains in her bedroom, so she rises when the sun does. Then she takes a picture of the view out her bedroom window every day – the same scene in different lights and seasons.

“In a couple of years I might have a fabulous show,” she said, laughing, but she’s not kidding.

After the picture, she and her guests gather in the kitchen, plan a hike and set out as soon as possible. Some days, it’s a “simple beach hike,” and her four chows – Zu-2, Paw-Paw, Chin-Chin and Empress Wu – go along. Other days, it’s a trek up the Precipice or Beehive trails. Among her favorite hikes are Dorr Mountain and The Tarn.

“Then we come home and have a delicious breakfast,” she said.

This breakfast, of course, is of the “hearty Maine” variety. A recent favorite is “light, fluffy cornmeal waffles.”

After breakfast, she gardens, shops for antiques or works on household projects. She has lunch in the early afternoon, usually around 1:30. Then she does yoga. Some days she and her guests kayak to Northeast Harbor and back. She’s a member of the Seal Harbor Yacht Club, so she might go there, or to the local library, which she enjoys. Often she sets out on her picnic boat, cruising to Isle au Haut or Swans Island to hike or as far as Lubec to see the whales.

“That was a fantastic trip,” she said of her last Lubec visit. “We saw so many birds and so much wildlife and so many seals. It was fascinating. I love to go and just look at the seals and all the different birds. We try to find them.”

Every time she takes her boat out, she makes sure to visit her “favorite osprey” on Sutton Island, facing Northeast Harbor. There, the large birds make their home in a nest dating back to the late 1800s. In addition to sticks and sea debris, the basketlike nest includes some interesting items.

“[College of the Atlantic] tells me that the nest dates back to 1880-1890,” she said. “It even has a bikini top in it – not from the 1880s, obviously.”

One day, when Martha saw a mother osprey flying with her chicks in tow, she got a little too enthusiastic.

“I ran my boat into a rock there because I was so excited,” she said.

Neither Martha nor the boat was hurt.

When she’s not on the water, she often can be found in it – by choice, not because of a boating accident. She isn’t afraid to jump into the Atlantic on a hot day, but she tries to avoid the frigid spots.

“A dip in the ocean is very important to me as often as possible,” she said. “I have a very specific way to do it. I find warm water, such as in Somes Sound, and jump off the boat. Or I wait until the tide is coming back in and then I go swimming. The warm sun heats up the rocks.”

If she wants to cool off, the ocean or one of the island’s lakes are Martha’s only options. Skylands doesn’t have a swimming pool, and she doesn’t plan to have one installed.

“I like the idea that there aren’t swimming pools around,” she said.

This is precisely what drew Martha to MDI – no pools, no big new houses built on lots too small for them, no flashiness. For someone who has turned understated style into a multimillion-dollar industry, Maine was a perfect fit.

“I don’t see the McMansions going up here as I do in Greenwich, Conn.,” she said. “In Maine, I think people really do care about the beauty of the old architecture.”

While Maine’s unspoiled architecture has inspired several articles in her magazine, Martha has focused on the state’s agriculture. A Stockton Springs blueberry barren has appeared both in the magazine and television version of Martha Stewart Living. In the coming months, an Aroostook County potato farm will be featured on her TV program.

“That kind of dedication to keeping things going and keeping the land productive is extremely important to me,” she said.

In Maine, Martha has found not only inspiration for her countless projects, but admiration for her neighbors.

“Wherever you go, if people are considerate that’s the really important thing,” Stewart said. “I find almost everyone considerate and nice and that’s what I look for in a community.”