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Ken Fulk has built his career around a simple but monumental: Design should bring people together.
Whether he is shaping a private compound, a high-concept restaurant, a members’ club, or a once-in-a-lifetime celebration, Ken approaches design as more than an exercise in aesthetics. Every detail contributes to a larger narrative—one intended to create connection, heighten a sense of occasion, and give people a reason to return.
It is an expansive philosophy, and it has produced an equally expansive practice. Today, Ken leads a team of 100 across San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, with projects spanning private residences, hotels, restaurants, yachts, planes, retail, and events. Through his eponymous retail brand, he extends that point of view into entertaining essentials, antiques, and decorative accessories designed for a life lived generously. His latest endeavor will see him partnering with the Dorchester Collection on the reimagining of The Beverly Hills Hotel, one of Los Angeles’s most storied destinations.
Ken’s work is always theatrical (in fact, he describes his projects as movie sets), but never without purpose. His interiors are layered with references to create environments that feel transportive without losing their sense of intimacy. Rather than prescribe a single aesthetic, Ken begins with the story a place should tell and the experience it should make possible.
That instinct is especially clear in his hospitality work. Ken recently completed the revitalization of San Francisco’s historic Huntington Hotel and his latest iteration of Major Food Group’s Carbone in London was named one of the 16 most beautiful restaurants in the world by the Prix Versailles and shortlisted for a Restaurant & Bar Design Award. His three social clubs—The Battery in San Francisco, The ’Quin House in Boston, and Commodore Perry Estate in Austin—reflect a belief that hospitality can provide a framework for community. Each project asks Ken to balance legacy with reinvention. The challenge is not simply to preserve what people already love, but to identify the qualities that made a place meaningful and translate them for a contemporary audience.
Ken has also translated this philosophy into cultural stewardship. In 2018, he founded Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting local artists and creatives through landmark properties in San Francisco and Provincetown, Massachusetts. The organization brings exhibitions, performances, conversations, and gatherings together under one roof, positioning the historic spaces as active participants in contemporary creative life.
That breadth has earned Ken a place on Architectural Digest’s AD100, Elle Decor’s A-List, and Forbes’ Top Designers list, as well as induction into Hospitality Design’s Platinum Circle Hall of Fame. In 2026, he received the Larry Kravet Design Industry Leadership Award from the New York School of Interior Design and the ICAA Northern California Chapter’s Julia Morgan Award for Stewardship.
The connecting thread in Ken’s work is always his ability to create meaningful experiences through design. At a moment when much of the world is mediated by screens, Ken’s work makes an emphatic case for physical space. It reminds us that the places where we gather still matter—and that design has the power to make those gatherings more memorable, more generous, and more human.
