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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
Designer Ken Fulk Choreographs a World All His Own - Hospitality Design
Designer Ken Fulk Choreographs a World All His Own.
Posted: Tue, 28 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]
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.
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Below, you can see some of the greatest projects, in our opinion, that Ken Fulk has created with his team. The matching of the colors with the eclectic style of textures and patterns go beautifully together, creating an immersion unlike any other. The colorful creations of Ken Fulk are one-of-a-kind as well as being coveted throughout the United States, especially starting town of San Francisco, California.
Business of Home mission Statement
His bicoastal firm is juggles a multitude of projects, among them a terrace for Gigi Hadid, private jets and sailing yachts, plus wallpaper, rugs, and fabrics for Pierre Frey. Ken Fulk’s clients (rapper Pharrell Williams, entrepreneur/philanthropist Sean Parker, fashion designer Veronica Beard) are as jazzy as he is. Given that Ken Fulk is an undisputed design world impresario, is it any wonder that the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant in the 1969 movie Hello, Dolly!
For Bryan O’ Sullivan, hospitality and good design go hand in hand
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.
Ralph Lauren’s Rules of Living Well
I’ve known these clients for a long time, having first developed a friendship rooted in a shared understanding that life is short and how you live it really matters. When we undertook this project, we had already collaborated on one home and had shared a host of adventures that often led to dancing on tables into the wee hours. As a result, we had developed a shorthand that helped inform not only the look but also the feeling of this house.
Inspiration at your fingertips
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.
Take the Goodtime Hotel in Miami, a collaboration with multi-hyphenate entertainer Pharrell Williams and entrepreneur David Grutman. Fulk brings his singular aesthetic to the interiors, a whimsical tour de force of eclectic details and his theatrical design style. His work at the Crown Club, a hidden gem in Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, New York is a “truly transformative space in an unexpected location,” he says.
Room Request! Casa San Agustín
Though Fulk is hardly a stranger to the stylish panache of the world’s most decadent social clubs (he also designed the interiors of The Battery San Francisco back in 2013), there’s something special and almost pure about the ’Quin House because it’s infused with so much historical authenticity. “Fear is the enemy of good design.” That’s the motto emblazoned in Latin across interior designer Ken Fulk’s upcoming book, and perhaps the best summary of his unbridled approach to decorating. “I seldom follow any traditional rules of interior design,” says the San Francisco–based talent, who’s behind some of today’s most inventive residential and commercial spaces. “I can’t imagine us ever doing a purely modern space without at least one old, crusty piece of furniture thrown in for good measure,” says Fulk.
Though newly built, the house had the character of an old-fashioned lodge, with massive timbers, hand-scraped floors, and ceilings soaring over 30 feet. It was February, so snow covered the ground, and Lake Tahoe’s intense blue presence filled the rooms and was amplified by the craggy, snowcapped peaks surrounding it. The first place the couple discovered their shared design affinities was in the living room, where a pair of mustard chairs procured at Paris’s Les Puces flea market set the tone for a sunny space orchestrated by Fulk. That room is also home to resin coffee tables and the Snyder-dubbed “nostalgic and playful” Daniele Nalin painting that hangs on one wall. “We both said, ‘This is it,’” she recalls of her and her husband. More recently, the room has also become where Snyder does her workouts, using the back of a chair as a barre for her latest venture, a boxing and ballet mashup called Boxerina.
It was a mutual admiration of this place that helped lay the groundwork for my friendship with Kevin Systrom, the cofounder of Instagram, and his wife, Nicole. All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
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.
While the work that Fulk does requires a highly trained eye, his is not the product of a classical design education. Founded in 1997, Ken Fulk Inc. was what could be called a happy accident. It was designed by Callister for Duncan’s patients to use when they saw him at the house, and Evans gifted it to Fulk. "But now, of course, it sports a leopard-print mattress and bolsters," he notes. The lobby, which is set off from the street by a soaring breezeway, feels like the secret entrance to a private club. Miami Beach is home to plenty of examples of hospitality done right, but a newcomer, towards the Southern end of Washington Avenue, brings something particularly fresh to the mix.
Evans announced that she was seeking a buyer who would fully respect the home’s integrity. So Fulk embarked on a letter-writing campaign to assure her that he and his husband, Kurt Wootton, a classically trained pianist, would be gracious custodians. "I told her the house had a soul and was meant to be this way," he says.
When it’s time to go home, though, the style maestro retreats to a perch above it all. "Welcome to my tree house!" he announces at the entrance gate to his hilltop residence in Clarendon Heights. It’s an appropriate description for the dwelling, considering it’s constructed largely of old-growth redwood and located in San Francisco’s highest neighborhood. Wearing a bow tie and a bespoke suit, Fulk leads a tour through his Zen-inspired garden and into the house, a 1950s design by prominent Bay Area modernist Warren Callister. The structure is composed of two perpendicular volumes topped by boatlike arched roofs.
That said, the 250-plus-piece art collection is only a piece—albeit a significant piece—of the complex puzzle that connects the old with the new. Like a Rubik’s Cube that needed to be reset in order to solve the puzzle, the redesign of the 8,000-square-foot home ended up touching on every room but two. A gut renovation allowed for the installation of a great room with high ceilings worthy of the family’s stonking art collection, including works by Cindy Sherman, Kehinde Wiley, Pablo Picasso, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—some of which didn’t even fit on the previous walls. “The idea was to have the house scoop up the view from everywhere, so we settled on a linear configuration with landscaped roofs that allow the hillside to be a blanket,” says the firm’s principal, George Bevan, who worked with landscape architect Mike Lucas of Lucas & Lucas.
