Table Of Content
- Event Designer and Decorator Ken Fulk’s House in San Francisco
- Ken Fulk always starts with a story
- Step Inside a Ken Fulk–Designed Gilded Age Members-Only Social Club in Boston’s Back Bay
- Related articles
- Inspiring Design Projects by Ken Fulk
- Former NFL Player Michael Bennett Tackles Furniture
- Who Can Turn a Silicon Valley Tudor Into a Rock-and-Roll Fantasia? Ken Fulk, Of Course
Little did they realize how true this moniker would one day become. The sunny guest bedroom, painted Farrow & Ball’s Sudbury Yellow, features a pair of vintage armchairs reupholstered in Ralph Lauren fabric, a pair of midcentury teak nightstands topped with table lamps from Hesperus Nauticals, and a bed by RH. Another one of what used to be the Algonquin Club’s preexisting features that heavily influenced Fulk’s creative direction? The late 19th- and early 20th-century classic American paintings that he inherited with the building. Fulk turned to curator Kate Chertavian to find incredible works and ultimately build a collection that would include everyone from Andy Warhol to Picasso, Rodin, and Kehinde Wiley.
Event Designer and Decorator Ken Fulk’s House in San Francisco
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Part of the hotel’s charm comes from its eclectic, lived-in feel. Fulk and his team deftly layered elements from different eras and movements, including Art Deco plasterwork, custom surrealist-inspired wallpaper, vintage books and objects and hand-painted murals, “to create the sense of stumbling into a grand old residence,” Fulk says. If you know of Ken Fulk, chances are you know of his dogs, a trio of English cream golden retrievers (better known, perhaps, as #polarbearsofptown) and a wire-haired dachshund, who populate the AD100 interior designer’s Instagram feed. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the story of this house—a newly constructed shingled number on Nantucket—starts with a visit to the vet. A sunny yellow guest bedroom is on offer to friends and family (“I’ve already had the pleasure of staying there,” Fulk reveals.) And the room above the pool house has been clad in reclaimed barnwood and turned into a late afternoon hangout for friends and family. In fact, designed as the only Gifford Nantucket house with a pool, they outfitted the pool house so that friends and family could swing by as they please, whether or not the couple was home.
Ken Fulk always starts with a story
In 2011 Fulk learned that Duncan’s widow, Gwendolyn Evans, was considering selling the house and arranged for a walk-through. Intrigued by his initial daytime visit, he requested to return and see it at night, and he found himself sitting in the great room in silence for an hour. "I thought, I am supposed to buy this house." Not that it would be that simple.
Step Inside a Ken Fulk–Designed Gilded Age Members-Only Social Club in Boston’s Back Bay
“I had never been trained as a designer,” Fulk points out, having instead graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a degree in English and history. “I never wanted anyone to tell me what kind of business I was supposed to have because it might limit me,” he adds. To inject the wonderland feel, they turned to San Francisco design impresario Ken Fulk, the man-about-town whose dapper suits and razzle-dazzle stagecraft have made him a West Coast favorite (just ask Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom or Fulk’s newest BFF, Gigi Hadid). From flower delivery and party planning to nose-to-tail home design, Fulk’s decor “think tank” does it all. What’s more, he and his staffers do it themselves, designing and creating bespoke curtains, wallpaper, and furnishings for clients.
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Check into Paramour Estate in Los Angeles Wallpaper.
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“The same can be said with period rooms—how boring if we only filled them with priceless antiques.” To the designer, a successful room is “all about this tension between the expected and the moments of surprise.” Here are some of the most fearless ways he has mixed it up. Though it’s infused with a lively and inventive spirit, that’s not to say that Ken Fulk Inc. isn’t very much a business. In recent years, the firm has been exploring taking ownership stakes in its commercial projects (which range from a coffee company to an omakase sushi bar to several hotels). The practice, says Fulk, ensures that both his firm and their clients are completely aligned in their incentives. Room by room, Fulk pictured spaces that provide comfort, provoke conversation, and brook no cliché. “The whole house is a Looney Tunes ode to artisans and artists of all sorts,” he says.
Inside Designer Ken Fulk’s Magical, Imaginative World
After a devastating wildfire, Ken Fulk uses his design magic to bring a family property back from the ashes. “My sister and I share a brain, and we don’t have to talk through everything,” notes Snyder. “Whereas the difference with a significant other is you’re coming at it from two different places and learning about each other through the process.
For the interiors, Fulk worked his magic, cultivating a mix of New England antiques, family heirlooms, and Scandinavian design references that gave the house personality and soul. “We were really conscious of it not feeling like a new house,” he explains. And in a house surrounded by water, we wanted everything to have a natural patina.” Vintage and antique furnishings culled from online marketplaces 1stDibs and Chairish as well as L.A. Emporium Obsolete were mixed up with classics from Ralph Lauren Home, Design Within Reach, and RH. Textural wallpapers by Phillip Jeffries and unexpected Farrow & Ball hues—like the deep brown mahogany in the study—made the place cozy, which DeVincent and Gifford planned to use year-round. However, the most constant place in our lives is Durham Ranch in Napa Valley [California].
Former NFL Player Michael Bennett Tackles Furniture
It has giant, 400-year-old oak trees, rock-strewn creeks, a big old party barn, and an old rancher’s cottage. Durham Ranch is named after our first golden retriever we got in Boston before moving to San Francisco. With that, we created this habit of naming houses after our dogs. But I can’t afford to name any more houses after dogs because we have too many dogs and not enough money to buy houses to name after them. Over-the-top events aside, Fulk and his team of employees are working hard to keep up with their growing roster of clients, which includes San Francisco’s new private club the Battery, Sonoma winery Three Sticks Wine and a New York restaurant from the team behind Italian hot spot Carbone. In the nearly two decades since the Virginia native settled in San Francisco, his interior-design work gradually morphed into something altogether broader.
“I’m a storyteller,” says Fulk, who oversees an 85-person team out of offices in San Francisco and New York City (think Andy Warhol’s Factory meets Santa’s workshop). The Silicon Valley town of Woodside, California, is not lacking in unicorns. Nestled in the foothills of the mountains just west of Stanford University, the woodsy enclave is teeming with tech billionaires, including Laurene Powell Jobs, Larry Ellison, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son. For 150 years Lake Tahoe has attracted generations of adventurers, artists, and pioneers to its shores—folks drawn to the magnificent rugged landscape of the Sierras and the intense beauty of the crystal-blue alpine lake.
It’s funny because I’ll sometimes be like, ‘I’m obsessed with this.’ And he’ll be like, ‘Oh, I hate that.’ Or vice versa,” Sndyer says. Sharply dressed designer and event planner Ken Fulk in his new Manhattan loft. To store his extensive wardrobe, Fulk transformed the guest room into a walk-in closet. Instead of hanger rails, his clothes—which are kept in individual monogrammed garment bags—are hung on racks that he converted from British Colonial hospital screens sourced in Mumbai. Vintage retail displays featuring glass-front compartments contain his shoes and stacks of perfectly folded shirts. The 3,200-square-foot house was commissioned by Dr. Cloyce Duncan, a former head of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.
Event planner, interior designer, and bon vivant Ken Fulk is a master of maneuvering between the various spheres of San Francisco society, from blue bloods to newly minted Silicon Valley tech titans—and beyond. Indeed, the charismatic Fulk is known for bringing diverse groups together and making special things happen. In 2012 he orchestrated a Halloween fundraiser for the Strand Theater that shut down an entire city block for a four-course dinner and a private Stevie Nicks concert. Ken Fulk’s highly sophisticated interiors—often swathed in colorful hand-painted wallpaper and decorated with a mix of centuries-old antiques and custom contemporary pieces—are almost instantly recognizable to anyone with an appreciation for design.
The smaller single-story section contains an office and bathroom, while the other features the bedrooms and entertaining spaces, including a dramatic triple-height great room where a 27-foot-tall window frames picturesque views of the city, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. I was always this showman, but there was a piece of me that was not okay with keeping the world at bay. When that changed and I felt like I could be my true self, suddenly my world changed because I felt like I was whole. I could go out, and I could be honest with myself and with the world.
“I had never lived with anyone before, besides my sister,” Snyder says of moving in together in their West Village apartment—which was designed by acclaimed AD100 decorator Ken Fulk. In the hybrid dressing room space, two different vintage wallpapers line the interior. “It feels really feminine and girly, and it’s fun to have a space that’s not so serious,” Sndyer says, speaking of the room. One particularly interesting artwork lives in the downstairs powder room of all places.
Take his longtime partnership with nightlife impresario David Grutman. Together, they have created the pastel-infused Swan restaurant, the whimsical Goodtime Hotel, and the recently opened, equally eclectic and singular Casadonna, all in Miami. Within a few months’ time, Kevin invited me up to see a spot he found on the north shore of the lake, just around the bend from where I had vacationed.
If you know of Ken Fulk, chances are, you know of his dogs, a trio of English cream golden retrievers (better known, perhaps, as #polarbearsofptown) and a wirehaired dachshund who populate the AD100 interior designer’s Instagram feed. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the story of this house—a newly-constructed shingled number on Nantucket—starts with a visit to the vet. When Fulk, who has a house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, took the dogs in for a checkup, he never guessed the local P-Town veterinarian, Dr. Stephen DeVincent, would become a future client.
