The homemaking queen’s relevancy endures—most recently, in a collaboration with Hapi Homes that follows a similar principle to her Kmartification of curated living.
In the late 1980s, Kmart introduced a Martha Stewart-branded home goods line to their customers. The move was shocking to many: As bonafide homekeeping royalty, whose magazine and television show brought her into millions of American living rooms, Stewart’s brand had always maintained a high-end shine. After all, her tips appeared tailored to the wealthy. Hosting an Easter brunch for 20, spending afternoons in the garden, making homemade seating cards for Thanksgiving dinner—these were tasks seemingly fit for a stay-at-home mom with plentiful disposable income. Bringing a line of goods—bed sheets and towels, dinnerware, furnishings, paints, and much more—to the average family seemed counter to the storybook vision for the lifestyle Stewart was selling. But, as Stewart said in the 2025 Netflix documentary, Martha, the move to Kmart meant bringing beautiful things to everyone.
Today, even though Kmart no longer is in business, Stewart is still marketing an accessible vision for the whole home to the market—literally. Last week, prefab homebuilder Hapi Homes launched a new line of Martha Stewart-branded single-family homes and accessory dwelling units modeled after Stewart’s four famed personal houses: Her Bedford County Farmhouse in Katonah, New York; her former penthouse residence on Perry Street in Manhattan; her masonry estate in Maine; and, her coastal East Hampton house. At price points between $125,000 and $460,000, prospective homeowners can purchase and build a new house that has Stewart’s stamp of approval. In a moment when homeownership itself has become a luxury, could she provide a new opportunity to bring something beautiful to the masses?
The Marquee Brands x Hapi Homes for Martha Stewart Iconic Estate Housing Collection features takes on several of her properties, past and present, including a house based off of Stewart’s one-time New York City apartment.
Renderings Courtesy of Hapi Homes
The Hapi-Martha prefab home follows a similar principle driving the original Kmartification of curated living: the ability to buy the template for a lifestyle. Hapi Homes, which uses a panelized light-gauge steel structure delivered on site, was created three years ago to rapidly build housing using a similar ethos—their prefab process, Hapi CEO Mary O’Brien tells Dwell, can deliver nearly 40 percent of a whole house to the site, reducing labor costs and construction waste, while ultimately being fully customizable. Their early ventures involved building out a technology platform that will allow clients to select a home design, configure it, and see pricing in real time, but they quickly saw an opportunity to partner with existing, well-known brands to bring their product to the market.
There’s also a smaller, ADU version of the structure.
Renderings Courtesy of Hapi Homes
“When we started seeking out different brands in the market, obviously Martha Stewart was the number one in terms of brand equity for home authority, design, and more,” says O’Brien. Stewart’s houses, “beautiful, architecturally designed homes,” as O’Brien describes them, serve as inspiration for the Hapi designs, rather than being exact replicas. Stewart’s Perry Street home, a condo designed by Richard Meier, has been rendered into a modern single-family house clad in white; Hapi pays homage to the floor-to-ceiling windows on the first floor, where large fenestrations cover much of the facade.
Skylands, named after Stewart’s Maine property, echoes that building’s masonry facade.
Renderings Courtesy of Hapi Homes
See the full story on Dwell.com: Why a Prefab Builder Is Making Houses With “Original Tradwife” Martha Stewart
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