December 14, 2021 By Andrew Sessa Town & Country
There’s a bit of a parlor game a certain set of design cognoscenti like to play. You could call it: “What will Ken Fulk do next?”
The creative polymath—who made his name imagining the 2013 Lord of the Rings–themed wedding of Napster founder Sean Parker—could more recently be found collaborating with Pharrell Williams on a candy-colored new hotel on Miami Beach; spinning out a tropical Mexican modern fantasy for a private home in Baja; channeling a Lake Como villa for a rooftop restaurant in Boston; turning a dilapidated early-20th-century Provincetown home into a boho-chic, winkingly period-perfect artists residence; and designing a new Surrealist-inspired line of fabrics for Pierre Frey.
More often than not for his restaurant, club, and hotel projects, he’s doing much more than simply taking on the interiors. He’s conceiving the design of every uniform, every matchbook and business card, and much of the (usually decadent) experience of being in these places, too.
Consider his role not only as designer but also co-founder and programming mastermind of Saint Joseph’s Art Society, a soaring San Francisco church turned retail, art, and performance hub where 19th-century taxidermy molds repurposed by Dutch artists Darwin, Sinke & van Tongeren hold flagpoles waving the club’s standard. Or his work overseeing the look, feel, amenities, and services of the Commodore Perry Estate, a grand hotel in a restored and reimagined 1928 Renaissance Revival mansion in Austin.
But in the past, every hotel Fulk has taken on he has also eventually handed off. As the designer commissioned by a property’s owners, or, even as an investor himself, he has turned over management and day-to-day operations to someone else.
Now, that’s all about to change.
Together with Clark Lyda (his partner in the Commodore Perry project), Fulk has just purchased one of the country’s most storied hotels: Blantyre, in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts. And he plans to keep ahold of it, too, running the place himself—albeit with a team of hospitable helpers—once his work on it is complete.
“It’s weird when you hand over the baby to be taken care of,” Fulk tells me when we catch up by phone, shortly after he completed the purchase, in between flights to Provincetown and San Francisco, where he keeps homes, as well as a jaunt to St. Barths. “I see that all the time. So, we began a conversation about what we would do if we were going to keep the baby, not give it up. It’s a big turn for me.”
Fulk says Blantyre—a Gilded Age Tudor-style mansion originally built in 1902 as a summer retreat for Industrialist Robert Patterson—was on a very short list of places he had his eye on. “I’ve been mesmerized by the Berkshires’ and the hotel’s history. It felt like just a rare jewel that maybe hadn’t been taken the best care of, but it hadn’t been screwed up, either.”
That sense of original history is what he’s always looking for “whenever we take on anything, but especially if it’s something that I personally am involved in at a level beyond being the designer.”
In order to undertake a top-to-bottom redo, he has closed Blantyre, planning to reopen it a year from now. He bought it from Silicon Valley real estate developer Linda Law, who’s owned it since 2016, when she purchased it from the family that began operating it as a luxury hotel in 1981, turning it into the first Relais & Chateaux property in America. (Prior to the ’80s, it had been a country inn and, later, a tennis club.)
Law had conceived her own rather formal, contemporized Gilded Age redo, which included bringing Daniel Boulud to Blantyre, an innovation Fulk will hold onto: “I went to New York to Daniel, and Daniel himself took my order, cooked my meal, and then sat with me for hours and talked about how he loves Blantyre. Who am I to tell Daniel Boulud what to do? He’s very committed to it.”
As for the rest of his plans, they’re coming together quite well, thank you very much.
Celebrated San Antonio–based modern classicist Michael G. Imber will handle the architecture, and English landscape designer Dan Pearson, whose garden was named Best in Show at the Chelsea Flower Show several years back, will take on Blantyre’s 100-plus acres. “It’s all going to get loved to death,” Fulk says.
As for his own studio’s design work? “First and foremost, it’s going to make the property look as it should look,” he says, explaining that his redesign will reinstate the best of its Gilded Age charms—and indulgences too. His recent work playfully reimagining Boston’s staid 19th-century Algonquin Club as the next-gen members-only ‘Quin could serve as a model, and a preview, of the sort of fin de siècle extravagance we can expect at Blantyre.
“We’re going to go back to when Blantyre was first built and run as this extraordinary private home. That’s the romantic point in time,” he says.
“Blantyre was inspired by the great estates of Europe and of England, in particular. Today, there are so many wonderful examples of great homes there that have been opened up to be run not as hotels, per se, but as grand residences where you can stay as a guest.
“Part of what started all of this, was the lack of great privately owned and operated hospitality experiences that don’t feel like hotels, especially in America” he says. “The word ‘hospitality” almost feels wrong because it sounds commercial. I want to operate this place to just be the very best version of itself. It will be the Blantyre of everyone’s dreams—a real reason to go there.”
And this is just the beginning. Moving forward, Fulk see himself buying and reimagining more properties like this and opening them to the public. “I want to be able to invite people into our little world and take care of them in the same way we take care of our private clients,” he says. “This is a chance to do just that.”