October 1, 2009 By CM C Magazine
On a Sunday afternoon in July, interior designer Ken Fulk popped open a bottle of champagne outside technology entrepreneurs Mark Pincus and Alison Gelb Pincus’ home in Cole Valley, San Francisco. The couple had been living in one of Fulk’s guest cottages for two months while he overhauled the modern bachelor pad that Pincus had been living in for over a dozen years before getting married last summer.“We wanted Ken to re-create the space into a home that speaks to both of our tastes,” says Gelb Pincus, a 35-year-old L.A. native who cofounded One Kings Lane, a home decor sales website. Fulk softened the home to make it feel cozier and more feminine, covering a large wall with branch-patterned wallpaper and adding Trina Trunk window treatments and a white desk in the office. Bold black-and-white stripes were painted on the dining room walls and a Moroccan-themed den was brightened up to make it feel more like a family room. He did pay some homage to Pincus’ bachelor life, hanging a large Larry Sultan porn shoot photograph over a bar in the living room. “It was a very post-’90s South of Market loft,” says Pincus, the 43-year-old founder of Zynga, a social gaming site. (He also started Tribe, among other Internet sites he sold.) “Now it’s like a little boutique hotel. It’s very Viceroy.”