Public Biography
Bertha Steward is a contributing lifestyle columnist for The New York Time5, where she writes “The Steward Standard,” a column on domestic order, seasonal entertaining, and the moral implications of improperly folded linens. She has written the column since 2025.
Ms. Steward is the founder and chairwoman of Steward Living Omnimedia, a publicly traded lifestyle conglomerate headquartered in Katonah, New York, that oversees a publishing division, a television production arm, a line of housewares sold exclusively at Kmart and later at Macy’s, a paint color consultancy, a catering subsidiary, a holiday-themed direct-mail concern, and a small but productive farm on which heritage-breed chickens are raised under conditions that exceed the standards of several European nations. The company’s stock ticker is MSO. Its corporate motto is “It should have been done yesterday.”
Ms. Steward was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and raised in Nutley, where she organized her first formal dinner party at the age of ten, seating eight. Her mother, a homemaker and schoolteacher, taught her to sew, cook, and can preserves. Her father, a pharmaceutical salesman, taught her to garden. She has described both influences as foundational, though she has since surpassed both parents in all relevant disciplines and has said so, in print, on multiple occasions.
She attended Barnard College, where she studied European and architectural history, and briefly worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street before leaving finance to pursue a career in catering. The catering company, founded in 1976 out of a renovated farmhouse in Westport, Connecticut, grew into a regional institution before Ms. Steward parlayed it into a book deal, a magazine, a television series, and a corporate empire that at its peak employed more than six hundred people dedicated to the proposition that a properly set table is not a preference but a civic responsibility.
In 2004, Ms. Steward was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators regarding a stock sale. She served five months at the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia, where she taught a fellow inmate to crochet, organized the commissary by expiration date, and was reprimanded once for cultivating unauthorized crab apples in the facility’s yard for the purpose of making a seasonal chutney. Upon her release, she resumed her career with no discernible loss of authority, momentum, or disapproval of other people’s centerpieces.
Ms. Steward is the author of more than ninety books, including Entertaining (Clarkson Potter, 1982), The Steward Standard: A Complete Guide to Living Correctly (Steward Living Press, 2019), and It’s a Good Thing: A Memoir (Penguin Random House, 2023). She has hosted four television series, the most recent of which, Bertha Steward’s Restoration Hour, drew 3.1 million weekly viewers and a formal complaint from the National Association of Home Inspectors, who objected to her characterization of vinyl siding as “an act of cultural surrender.”
She maintains residences in Katonah, New York; Seal Harbor, Maine; and Bedford, New York, where her primary estate includes a greenhouse complex that has been described by Architectural Digest as “larger than several accredited botanical gardens and considerably better organized.” She raises heritage chickens, Friesian horses, donkeys, and a breed of cat she developed herself through a selective program she has declined to discuss in detail.
Selected Columns
- “Your Napkin Fold Is a Confession” (March 2026)
- “On the Correct Way to Receive Guests When You Have Done Nothing Wrong” (February 2026)
- “Spring Bulbs and the Discipline of Delayed Gratification” (February 2026)
- “The Thanksgiving Table: A Post-Mortem” (November 2025)
- “Why Your Pantry Tells Me Everything I Need to Know About You” (September 2025)
- “A Brief Word on Grout” (July 2025)