Ken Fulk: The life of the party has arrived


When Ken Fulk burst onto the scene in 2010 with a splashy masquerade ball honoring jet-setter Denise Hale at his South of Market studio, it seemed he’d come out of nowhere.

The little-known interior designer brought together socialites, politicians and business leaders, titillated them with lavish fare and voyeuristic scenes from San Francisco’s underground subculture, and used the event, dubbed Halestorm, as his calling card.

Soon, he was decorating the homes and offices of the Bay Area’s burgeoning billionaire set (Zynga’s Mark Pincus) and masterminding elaborate weddings (Napster co-founder Sean Parker’s “Hobbit”-themed nuptials in Big Sur). He was also, like the late elder statesmen of the San Francisco design scene (Anthony HailMichael Taylor), becoming an arbiter of taste for his clients where fashion and entertaining were concerned.

Cocktail-party whispers followed: “Who is he? How is this happening? Where did he come from?”

It wasn’t from nowhere.

The 49-year-old has spent a lifetime honing the skills and showmanship that has made his Ken Fulk Designs Inc. the most sought-after design and branding firm in town — and this year his most successful yet.

Hot on the heels of the Battery, a five-level private social club that drew international attention when it opened in 2013 (designed by Fulk, founded by Bebo.com millionaires Michael and Xochi Birch), 2014’s schedule contained more than a dozen high-profile projects.

They included interiors for Crystal Jade Jiang Nan, San Francisco’s largest restaurant; a renovation of the relocated Marlowe restaurant; remodeling of the iconic Mark Hopkins hotel on Nob Hill (due in 2016); the design of a forthcoming 226-unit residential tower in New York’s Hudson Yards; and a national retail project launching in January.

Fulk, who often dresses in Edwardian suits and bow ties, has no formal interior design training and envisions his design projects as movies in his head, from opening credits to the last reel.

“He is the Ziegfeld of San Francisco,” said Hale, who was once married to Hollywood director Vincente Minnelli. “Ziegfeld was the biggest, most legendary producer ever on Broadway, with his Follies, and I really feel that Ken is the same, with his extravagance and elegance.”

Parker, who also worked with Fulk on a private music club in Los Angeles, had even higher praise. In an e-mail to collaborators (shared by Fulk with The Chronicle), he wrote: “He is the Frank Lloyd Wright of our generation. The greatest living genius of interior design and architecture. This will be clear to the world in due time, but for now he is willing to entertain our hair (sic) brained vision and realize it in a way that we could not have imagined.”

Fulk’s outre parties, whether held at museums or in his studio, feature gourmet foods and wines paired with DJs and elements such as bare-chested men in leather to lend a mildly naughty edge.

For the launch of his collectibles shop, Peep Show, on Seventh Street in 2011, he hosted a nighttime carnival with 19th century costumed characters for 800 guests. For Jean Paul Gaultier’s 2012 fashion retrospective at the de Young Museum, a dinner for arts patrons ended with a surprise burlesque show by Dita von Teese. A pre-wrecking-ball party at the Top of the Mark featured an Egyptian theme. Half-naked male dancers dressed as pharaohs and drag queens added oomph.

Fulk’s designs tend to combine antiques, modern art and taxidermy, leading some to call him a “one-note wonder.” But in shying away from a strict regimen of classicism and tradition, Fulk enjoys what San Francisco design historian Ed Hardy calls “a freedom and latitude of choice that would have constrained someone like Tony Hail, who was tied to what was right, accepted and what was protocol.”

Fulk is creating a summer compound in Inverness for philanthropists Alexis and Trevor Traina, with an old-time fishing-camp theme. “He imagines design like an Old World theater director,” Alexis Traina said, “where every single detail is a rich, sensory experience that tells a piece of a great story hatched by Ken and his clients.”

Fulk, who has one older sister, was raised in rural Virginia. His parents were restaurant owners. At 6, he picked his own preppy suits. At 8, he picked his mother’s dresses. As a teen, he participated in high school theater. “I liked the transportive nature of it — of taking people to other places,” he said.

In college, he studied English and history and planned to be a lawyer. But afterward, he and a friend started a textile company in Boston. The business allowed Fulk to live anywhere. For Christmas in 1992, he gave his boyfriend (now husband), Kurt Wootton, a box. Inside: boxes of Rice-a-Roni; models of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Transamerica Pyramid and a cable car; and airplane tickets for a trip to San Francisco.

In 1994, they arrived permanently. “It felt like I could exhale,” Fulk said. “Life is harder in Boston. The sky is open here. Everything is startlingly beautiful.”

Fulk created a line of children’s bed linens and pajamas called Doodlezoo, with characters he described as “’Sesame Street’ on acid.” He arranged for licensing with a national retailer, signed a 13-book deal with Chronicle Books and sold the TV rights to a cable network (the show never aired). He’d sold his share in the textile firm by then, so Fulk, now unemployed, needed a job. Friends rallied by asking him to decorate their homes.

“It was like a faucet that never went off,” he said of his interior design firm, launched in 1997, and a home-staging arm in 2000. Floral design, wedding planning and advising clients on clothes shopping followed.

Not that success has gone to Fulk’s head. True, he drives a Maserati and owns a house on Twin Peaks, a ranch in St. Helena and a home in Provincetown, Mass. But he is as generous today, said longtime friend Wendy Blake Hamm, as when they met 25 years ago, when he volunteered to help her and a girlfriend move into a new apartment in Boston. This year, he treated Blake, her husband and Wootton to a trip to Paris for her 50th birthday. “He has more on his plate and more on his mind,” she said, “but he lives his life and makes room for his friends.”

Wootton, who serves Fulk turkey casseroles when he comes home from work (after Fulk pets their three golden retrievers), said Fulk’s compulsive need for order has not diminished with time, either.

“He cannot live in clutter, so before Ken comes home, I do a quick walk-through, and if there’s stuff that’s not pleasing to his eye, he’s going to fix it,” Wootton said. “Ken has been like that since the day I met him. I thought it was a little peculiar at first. But once everything is OK, he can let it go.”

It’s that keen eye for detail that Anna Weinberg and James Nicholas, owners of popular Cavalier and Marlowe restaurants, have come to trust implicitly.

“There are very few people in life who do what they are meant to do,” Nicholas said. “Ken is one of them. He’s a natural.”