You once said in an article that your home in Westport, Connecticut, was "underutilized," and you described Westport itself as a fairly grim example of isolation. You suggested there are fewer ties between people, and their patterns have been eroded by the introduction of generic shops, all of which is making the suburban experience thinner and thinner. Do you think your audience views you, to some extent, as a virtual antidote to their isolation?

| Rem Koolhaas

STEWART: There is isolation between houses in the suburbs. The homes I like the best are totally occupied, busy, and useful, whether it's a tiny little house or a great big one. Rarely do you find a great big house that's used in a good way. So I prefer smaller spaces that are full of books, full of things that people are doing. My favorite room is my sister's kitchen, with three computers on the table, the sewing machine, all the thread, the patterns, the animals, pots on the stove. It's that lively hub that really attracts me. All I really want is a three-room house. The home I have designed at my new farm in Bedford, New York, is a three-room house: bedroom on top, living room in the middle, and kitchen on the ground. My new apartment in Manhattan is two rooms – two floors, really – but two rooms. The Bunschaft house [in East Hampton] that I bought interested me because it was three rooms. That's all I want. It fits me, fits my lifestyle.

But you have already mentioned eight rooms. Each house is small, but they add up to eight rooms. Ah, but my houses, Rem, are my laboratories, so I have to have them. They are all different styles, so I can experiment: How do you cope with the modern way of living in an 1800 house, a 1925 house, a 1960 house, and a 2001 house? Bill Gates' house, for example, is totally out of date now. He built it right before wireless happened. The big tunnels for all his wires – he doesn't need any of that stuff anymore.

So it's aging faster than homes that are more traditional? Right.

Why do you think so many people want to learn from you? Well, we have been editing, and editing, and editing – rooms, and living spaces. I can go in a room and just take out, take away.

But you described your favorite room as a prototype of completely unedited living. So this is my real question: Living, traditionally, was unedited. Yet you're a huge editor, and you're hugely successful. I think people realize that in that edited space can be life. Nobody complains that our sets look empty and devoid, because we build them as real rooms. The sets for my television show work – they are enlarged copies of my real spaces.

What do you think your audience does with your advice? Do they turn their houses into Martha Stewart houses? No! I don't go into people's houses and see me everywhere, not at all. They get ideas from our magazines, our publications, and our TV show. That's how they get inspired.

What would you say has changed in the experience of the home in the past 20 years? The biggest challenge has been incorporating technology. It's hard, in an old home, to become wired. The complicated nature of the building makes it very hard to get wires out of view.

Is there anything that you think ought to be invented to make all of us happier? I have a dream – a computer screen that can be anywhere. It would be voice-activated – I'd like to be able to talk to my screen, on my refrigerator or on my wall. I'm busy, I'm always running around, so I want instant on/off. I know it can be done. The homemaker doesn't want to wait. She wants to make time to do other things.

Have you talked to anybody about this? I've talked to Steve Jobs, and to Bill Gates' crew, about a technology for the homemaker, but they're not interested. So I'm developing my own software, a home organizer. It tells you what kind of curtain you could make and gives you a pattern and the yardage. It gives you proportions with which you can design your room. It also tells you how much water your house used last August – no need to go back to the paper file. I want my utility company, my insurance company, to send me everything via computer. I call it living by synopsis. It's very simple, but I think it will be very big. I've been thinking about this for five years, and we now have an outline for it. I presented it to John Doerr's guys [at the VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers], and they said, well, that's rather ambitious. It's not ambitious, it just takes a long time.

Not only did you build an empire based on your taste, but now Martha Stewart is moving into new territories – Japan, and possibly China. Is there anything that you would not want to export? No.

Is taste exportable? Look, the world has become a smaller place. Access to the Internet has enabled every single culture to relate to every other culture. I have China, the largest country in the world, yet to conquer – and I don't mean conquer egomaniacally. I would love them to know about transferware [a type of decorated pottery] because, in fact, they developed it.

But let's make the question a bit more political. The unhindered progress of American civilization in many different countries is beginning to register some resistance. Do you feel that? They hate us. But mostly for our politics, not for our lifestyle. They don't hate the way we cook; they hate the way we behave. So I can't take any responsibility for any of that. All I can do is help everybody, everywhere, live a little better.