Who Runs SF?

She’s a European-born aristocrat. He’s a small-town boy from Virginia. Together, ken Fulk and Denise hale form the city’s most fabulous—and strictly platonic—power couple.


When people ask Denise Hale and Ken Fulk what keeps them together, they say it’s the sex. Yes, there is a bit of an odd-couple quality to the youngish interior design guru and the older society queen – the decades she has on him (she admits only to being “39-plus”); the fact that he’s gay and in a 20-year relationship and she’s been thrice married to rich and famous men; the facT that she is old-world, old-school, and blue-blooded, while he transformed his small-town Southern self into the design darling of San Francisco’s upper crust. But their differences only amplify the way that Hale and Fulk square each other’s social significance. He is the undisputed thrower of the best parties in the city; she tops the list of guests to get. While he lends hipness to anyone and anything around him – his soirees as well as the boutique businesses and rich-as-God individuals who hire him for one-of-a-kind decor – she brings glamour in spades.