It’s almost impossible to keep up with Ken Fulk. At the time of this writing, the self-described “designer of experiences large and small” had recently completed a European-style brasserie and the public spaces at the Four Seasons Hotel Boston, and he was gearing up to debut a handful of other projects, including Casadonna, a restaurant in a historic former women’s club in Miami, and Mankas, a reinvention of a beloved early 1900s lodge along Tomales Bay in Inverness, California.
The latter is one of five properties Fulk has purchased with developer Clark Lyda as part of a joint venture, InHouse, that aims to rescue and restore old hotels. “We care deeply about these historic places and making them the best versions of themselves,” says Fulk, an Architectural Digest AD100 honoree and two-time James Beard Award nominee for Outstanding Restaurant Design. “In the process, we’re redefining what luxury is, because these aren’t standardized hotels—we’re keeping them eccentric.” In addition to Mankas, he’s reviving New Orleans’s Soniat House, which he calls “a Tennessee Williams [play] that’s come to life in the oldest part of the French Quarter,” and Blantyre, “a Gilded Age estate in the Berkshires that was America’s first creative retreat.”
One might say that Fulk was born (or at least bred) to design hospitality spaces. When he was growing up in Harrisonburg, Virginia, his parents owned a filling station/general store and several restaurants, including one in a historic hotel, and his family embedded the idea of true hospitality—caring for and being in service to others—in him from a young age. “It became part of who I am,” he says. “One of the key questions I used to ask all new hires was, ‘Have you ever worked in a restaurant?’”
Still, Fulk came to his present profession circuitously. He never formally studied architecture or design; rather, he says, “[I’ve] always been innately confident in my ability to dream big.” To wit, after college he started a shower curtain and decorative pillow business with a friend, then launched his own children’s media company, Doodlezoo, creating characters that were basically “Sesame Street on acid.” He published half a dozen children’s books and ended up selling the intellectual property to Discovery Channel, hoping the network would develop a theme park or at least a TV show. “We thought we were going to be rich and famous,” he recalls, “but nobody got rich and famous, and I needed a job.”
He was working as a maitre’d in San Francisco when he scored his first interior design gig: The restaurant’s owner liked his style and asked Fulk to decorate his apartment. “I dressed to the nines every night—folks thought I owned the place,” Fulk remembers with a laugh. Fortunately his boss loved his work. “Then it was like a faucet: Suddenly, I had a decorating business.”
In particular, Fulk made his name by producing lavish events for San Francisco and Silicon Valley titans. (The multimillion-dollar 2013 wedding he created in a Big Sur redwood grove for Napster cofounder and former Facebook president Sean Parker sent his business skyrocketing.) Today, 26 years on from his scrappy start, Fulk employs a staff of 80, split between offices in San Francisco and New York. (He has homes in both cities, as well as Napa Valley and Provincetown, Massachusetts). He has designed countless events, homes, restaurants, hotels, private jets, and yachts, with clients and collaborators that include Gigi Hadid, Pharrell Williams, Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom, and journalist Ronan Farrow, who wrote the foreword to Fulk’s latest monograph, The Movie in My Mind, which Assouline published last year.
Upon reflection, does Fulk find himself at all surprised by his success? “From a place of amazement and gratitude, it does blow my mind,” he admits. “But I always thought I was going to have this dance-on-tables, tuxedo life, because I thought that’s what everybody did. Why would you have any other kind of life?”
