“I’m going to trip!” Ken Fulk yelled as he barreled down the stairs of the Flemish Revival building in Lower Manhattan where his design company has a New York office. Mr. Fulk, who was rushing to catch a helicopter, had a Louis Vuitton monogram duffle bag in one hand and an Away suitcase in the other. He stuffed them into a car idling outside before climbing in and being whisked away to a helipad on the Hudson River.
From there, Mr. Fulk, 60, flew to the Hamptons to meet with the owner of a home he is decorating there. Later that Wednesday in early April, he had another flight to catch — this one to Verbier, in the Swiss Alps, where he had a meeting about another project.
Mr. Fulk, who lives primarily in San Francisco, started his interior design business there in the 1990s. In recent years, he has been exporting his taste to places across the country and the world. Along with decorating the homes of fashion designers, technology executives and diplomats, he has given his touch to private clubs like the ‘Quin House in Boston and restaurants like Carbone. After designing its locations in Las Vegas and Miami, he is now working on its outpost in London, which is expected to open this summer.
The globe-trotting and creativity his career has demanded is “what I was built to do,” said Mr. Fulk, who recently opened namesake stores selling Ken Fulk-branded home goods in San Francisco and in West Hollywood, Calif. He is planning to open a third in New York later this year.
The West Hollywood store is not far from the site of another project, the Beverly Hills Hotel. Inside, Mr. Fulk is designing a spate of new spaces, including what he described as a “palm-lined, Copacabana supper club” and a lobby bar.
“We are not touching the Polo Lounge,” Mr. Fulk said of the hotel’s marquee establishment, a famously clubby hangout for Hollywood titans. “There would be rioting out front.”
He was joking. But Mr. Fulk’s aesthetic, which can evoke descriptors like “maximalist” or “more-is-more,” is somewhat the opposite of quiet luxury. Wendy Goodman, the design editor of New York Magazine, characterized it as “unabashedly unapologetic luxury.”
“It isn’t for everybody,” Ms. Goodman said. “But on the other hand, in design, you see a lot of things that are very safe because people don’t know how to express themselves. Ken knows what he wants. He’s all about the comfort of luxury, which is very seductive. He has a sense of how people want to sit and talk together.”
His client list includes various San Francisco elites. Mr. Fulk has worked with former Vice President Kamala Harris, a former district attorney there, and with Trevor and Alexis Traina, a wealthy and well-connected couple who live in the city. They had him redecorate the U.S. Ambassador to Austria’s residence in Vienna after Mr. Traina was appointed to the position during the first Trump administration. In one room of the home, Mr. Fulk mixed disparate pieces from the Trainas’ art collection, including an abstract Rudolf Bauer painting and a large Tina Barney photograph, with Josef Hoffmann furniture upholstered in powdery pink velvet.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Fulk was the go-to decorator for Silicon Valley figures like Kevin Systrom, a founder of Instagram, and Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and the first president of Facebook. Mr. Fulk also orchestrated Mr. Parker’s 2013 wedding, a medieval fantasia set among the redwoods of the Big Sur region in California, at which custom outfits by a “Lord of The Rings” costume designer were provided to each guest.
“Ken is an imagineer,” said the fashion designer Zac Posen, another client. Mr. Fulk decorated his rental home in San Francisco after Mr. Posen moved to the city in 2023 to take the creative reins at Gap Inc. The residence was built in the 1850s by a ship captain, a history Mr. Fulk nodded to with furnishings like old boat lights and anchor chains.
“It has the feeling of being in a ship, very aquatic,” said Mr. Posen, who has known Mr. Fulk since the early 2000s, and who tapped him as the creative director for a recent campaign for Banana Republic, a brand under Mr. Posen’s umbrella. “Ken understands the theater and fantasy of life.”
Mr. Fulk said that, in a word, his aesthetic could be called optimistic. “There is a theatrical nature to it, but nothing is there just by happenstance,” he added, explaining that he has fashioned himself less after the decorators Dorothy Draper and Tony Duquette, whose exuberant interiors are detectable in Mr. Fulk’s work, and more after Busby Berkeley, the director known for his fantastical and elaborate film sequences. (“Ken Fulk: The Movie in My Mind” was the title of a hefty coffee table book about Mr. Fulk released by Assouline in 2022.)
At his company, Ken Fulk Inc., which now has about 100 employees, design projects often begin in the same way that films do. “We write a script,” Mr. Fulk said. For the Carbone restaurant he designed in Miami, he described the narrative as “Maria Callas waking up next to Frank Sinatra in the Gritti Palace.”
“I think it’s because I was never trained,” Mr. Fulk added about his approach. “I can’t draw a circle.”
He studied history and English at Mary Washington College, now the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Va., and moved to San Francisco after briefly living in Washington, D.C., and Boston. After working in restaurants and starting some unsuccessful businesses — a company that sold shower curtains and pajamas, another that sold and licensed children’s books — Mr. Fulk got his first decorating gig when a friend in San Francisco asked him to put together his apartment. After that, he worked as a house stager and landed more interior design jobs by word of mouth.
“I was always the friend with taste,” said Mr. Fulk, a fastidious dresser whose exuberance is reflected by his preferences for bow ties, boyish Thom Browne suits and wearing his hair in a tidy “Leave It To Beaver” coif. “I’ve done all my own shopping since I was 6,” he added.
Mr. Fulk and his older sister grew up in Harrisonburg, Va., a small town in the Shenandoah Valley. Their parents owned bars and restaurants in the area. He described his life back then as comfortable, if not as grand as his aspirations. “When I was 4 years old, I said I wanted to live in a penthouse in Manhattan, even though I had never left my hometown,” he said.
He has yet to get that penthouse — lately, when in New York, he has been staying at a hotel near his office. In San Francisco, he and his husband, Kurt Wootton, 59, have a home in the Clarendon Heights neighborhood. The couple, who met in Boston in 1991, have three golden retrievers (Duncan, Ciro and Sal) and also own a ranch in Napa Valley, along with an oceanfront house in Provincetown, Mass.
Mr. Wootton, who formerly worked in retail at companies like Neiman Marcus and Williams Sonoma, said that Mr. Fulk “is very much the conductor of this thing called life.” He added that, when his husband isn’t working, they are often cooking together (they like Indian and Italian cuisine) or relaxing with their dogs.
Mr. Fulk also owns the Mary Heaton Vorse house in Provincetown, an 18th-century home across the street from his residence, which he runs as an arts center that hosts events, offers temporary residencies to working artists and occasionally serves as a guesthouse for friends like the actress Jennifer Coolidge, who crashed there last summer when Mr. Fulk’s home was full. (He established a similar operation in San Francisco, called Saint Joseph Arts Society.) Mr. Fulk bought the Vorse house in 2018 for $1.17 million — a price with as many digits as his fee for decorating homes, which he said now starts “in the low seven figures.”
He travels between his residences as he and his staff work on dozens of projects at once. “My superpower is saying yes to stuff,” Mr. Fulk said, explaining that his voracious appetite for new opportunities partly resulted from living through the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. He came away from that time with a mentality of “do everything right now,” he said.
Jobs Mr. Fulk is currently devoted to include a new boutique hotel in Barcelona and his namesake retail business, where people can buy Ken Fulk candles ($125) and caviar sets ($365) along with décor and jewelry and from other makers. He opened the stores with the help of Dave DeMattei, a former chief financial officer at Gap Inc., whom Mr. Fulk hired in the same capacity at Ken Fulk Inc. in 2023.
The thinking behind the retail expansion, Mr. DeMattei said, was that “not everyone can afford the houses Ken does, but they can go in now and buy a little piece of it.” Mr. Fulk, he added, “is 24-hours-a-day, workaholic, never says no.”
Another thing that Mr. DeMattei has encouraged Mr. Fulk to do: television. Last year, he signed with Creative Artists Agency. But Mr. Fulk isn’t sure if the small screen is for him.
“TV is great, and I know it’s popular, but it isn’t me,” he said. Instead, he hopes his work could be the subject of, yes, a film (specifically a documentary).
“I would like to preserve some pieces of it that way,” he said. “It’s all so terribly cinematic.”
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