B Y J AC I C O N R Y
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CIRCLE Over thirty years after he lived in Back Bay, the inimitable designer returns to work in Boston and goes beyond, to the Berkshires.
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fter graduating from college in the late 1980s, Ken Fulk moved to Boston where he lived in apartment on 208 Commonwealth Avenue. He worked in marketing—a job he hated, but his apartment was pretty fabulous. “It was defini ely beyond my means at the time,”
recalls Fulk. He was captivated by the view from that parlor unit: his windows looked out at the leafy Commonwealth Mall and across the way to The Algonquin Club, the regal Beaux Arts McKim, Mead & Whitedesigned building of Boston’s old-guard elite social club. “I’d watch the folks coming and going from The Algonquin. I was always a little bit fascinated by the activity over there,” recalls Fulk, who delighted in many aspects of Boston back then, especially the city’s historic architecture.
Ken Fulk spends much of the year at his home on Cape Cod, in Provincetown. He shares the retreat with his husband and the three golden retrievers they lovingly refer to as the “Polar Bears.”
Yet he wasn’t destined to remain in Boston. He made many friends here and met his future husband in a local laundromat, but he moved to San Francisco after a couple of years. “At the time, I felt like an alien, like I was always looking out the window. I needed to go somewhere I could be free to invent myself and I couldn’t do that at the time in Boston,” says Fulk. By the mid-1990s, Fulk had found his calling and was well on his way to establishing himself as the extraordinary hospitality and residential designer he is today. With no formal training, Fulk has an innate, utterly unrivaled design sensibility. He is propelled to create experiences for his
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