When Sean Parker — the Silicon Valley wunderkind billionaire infamously portrayed by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network” — delivered his wedding speech in 2013, he thanked design maven Ken Fulk even before acknowledging his new wife.
Parker had given Fulk four months and an unlimited budget to imagineer an elaborate, “Lord of the Rings”-themed fantasy wedding in the California redwoods, replete with set-designed bridges, a crumbling castle, a 10-foot throne and custom-tailored costumes for all 364 guests.
The astonishing, otherworldly result is emblematic of Fulk’s “what rulebook?” approach to design, and helps explain why he’s quickly become San Francisco’s most in-demand décor wizard and party master.
The self-styled Pan of Silicon Valley’s exploits include decorating the homes of tech power couples like Mark and Ali Pincus; designing the city’s ultra-cool, private Battery club; and advising newly minted billionaires on everything from evening attire and hairstyles to which home to buy in tony Pacific Heights.
“I spend my days figuring out how to make things look better,” Fulk tells Alexa.
Now the tech whisperer is bringing his incorrigible verve to the Big Apple, opening a studio on the Lower East Side this April. He’s currently overseeing two restaurants for Major Food Group (owners of Carbone, Dirty French and Parm), styling three private Manhattan residences (he’s already completed five, including Parker’s West Village townhouse) and designing a 226-unit apartment complex on 38th Street (near the massive Hudson Yards development), from the ground up.
At that building, dubbed The Hi-Side, he hopes to bring the intimacy and food options of The Battery club to New York apartment living.
“It’s a bit of an experiment,” he says with a laugh. “If we have any signature style, it’s really about finding the balance and the tension between eras.”
Indeed, Fulk and his 49-person team of “magicians” are known for mixing Biedermeier chests with taxidermy giraffes. But if anyone can pull it off — and become besties with the developers along the way — it’s this bow tie-wearing bon vivant.
When he presented the plans this summer for his first NYC restaurant, Sadelle’s (opening in April), “I flew in to give the owners a presentation without much exchange with them in advance,” Fulk confesses. “I was like, ‘Here is your restaurant, here is the logo, here are the renderings.’ ”
Most designers would have awaited a brief, orchestrated a few meetings, done a site study. But Fulk — armed only with an English degree and uncanny design foresight — didn’t know any better. “I’ve never worked for a designer,” he explains.
“I never had anyone telling me how I was supposed to run this business. I sort of made up a career as I went along.”
Fulk, 49, grew up in rural Virginia, where even as a young child he was in charge of planning family events and helping the local tailor design his miniature blue blazers. “You could say I arrived early to the style world and came out fully formed,” he laughs.
After graduating from the University of Mary Washington, he launched a children’s product line called Doodlezoo (featuring pajamas, linens, books and even a TV show), moved to San Francisco in 1994, and eventually sold his company to the Discovery Channel.
Soon after, friends who admired Fulk’s style asked if he might help decorate their home.
The house was a hit — by 1997 he’d launched his own interior design business and by 2008 he was redoing the $29 million home of tech power couple Michael and Xochi Birch, who would later hire him to oversee their Battery club.
“All mavericks push the box,” notes Fulk’s friend Cornelia Guest, founder of Cornelia Guest Events and a fixture on the New York charity circuit. “And what rules do we really have anyway? Times are changing.”
After meeting the designer a couple of years ago at her San Francisco book-launch party, Guest was instantly smitten. She’s since tapped him to head her Hamptons house hunt and is a champion of his East Coast expansion.
“Ken’s intent is good, so is he really breaking the rules?” she adds.
Not that Fulk doesn’t revel in shock and awe: To raise money for San Francisco’s Strand theater, he held a dinner in his SoMa studio (a former S&M leather factory), then shut down the street below for an impromptu “Rocky Horror Picture Show” singalong and a surprise 15-song concert by Stevie Nicks.
He entertained guests at the opening of Jean Paul Gaultier’s retrospective at the de Young Museum with a burlesque show by Dita Von Teese.
He’s also launched a line of candles and has been appointed a Dior Homme brand ambassador. But his official job title is difficult, even for him, to pin down.
“I’m just the lucky guy who won the lottery,” he says.
And now, with the winds of fortune blowing Fulk and his ponies-dressed-as-unicorns aesthetic to New York, he’s more determined than ever to celebrate audacity.
“Life all goes by in a moment’s notice, so I want everything to be a celebration,” he says. “I always say, if you want to go big, go big. Be ridiculous.”
TOP PHOTO: Décor whiz Ken Fulk, the darling of Silicon Valley’s billionaires-in-training, is bringing his brand of outsize adornment to NYC this year. Courtesy of Douglas Friedman.
Fulk’s East Coast designs
▲ Fulk decorated an 1850 sea captain’s home in Provincetown, Mass., with antiques and flea market finds — he recently sold it to chef Gary Danko.
Fulk’s West Coast works
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— Profiles by David Kaufman, Zachary Kussin, Kevin Sintumuang & Andrew Sessa