Zac Posen and Harrison Ball Revive a Ramshackle 1850s Captain’s Cottage on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill

You could call them the fairy-tale tenants. Imagine this: One of the cooler couples in America— fashion designer Zac Posen and ballet dancer turned actor Harrison Ball—fall in love with a charming but vaguely tired rental cottage in San Francisco’s historic Telegraph Hill. After signing the lease they ask the landlord: “Are you good if we decorate it with, um, Ken Fulk?”

The story begins about two and a half years ago, when Posen was hired as executive vice president and creative director at San Francisco–based Gap Inc. and chief creative officer at Old Navy. The couple, who have been engaged for four years—“We’re those kind of gays,” quips Ball; “We’ll probably be engaged for another 20”—jumped into the relocation process. While Posen started at the Gap offices, Ball and his father drove across the country with two miniature poodles, Tsuki and Bizet, a painting of a man on a horse Ball had found in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and a few suitcases. “This move was in the spirit of the pioneers,” Posen says on a video call from his New York office (they remain bicoastal). “It was definitely this feeling of going West, discovering the unknown.” Ball, meanwhile, had recently retired as a principal dancer at New York City Ballet and was about to take up acting (among other projects, he starred in Brokeback Mountain at Chicago Shakespeare Theater earlier this year).

About to sign on a different house, a self-confessed “Zillow queen,” Ball took one more look online and found this place, an 1850s captain’s cottage with views of the bay. “I knew before I saw it that this was it: by the sea, a metropolitan New York feeling but on island time. I grew up going to Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire, so this was like finding my old family house again,” he says. He called Posen at the office to say his dreams had come true. Posen, in turn, fell for the higgledy-piggledy architecture and the history. “After the captain, a Russian aristocrat lived here, then it became a club during Prohibition. Everyone in town knows this house. I’ve heard that Joan Baez lived here for a while, Martha Stewart came for dinner, and Armistead Maupin lived on this street while writing Tales of the City.” But the place felt unloved. “It was furnished but it had an Airbnb vibe. The garden was dead. Moss everywhere,” Ball explains via Zoom from the backyard, now lush with pink begonia, Brugmansia, Ligularia, coyote mint, and tumbling ferns, much of it sourced locally and all planted by him.

The decorating—or undecorating—began after the couple ran into Ken Fulk, the AD100 interior designer, at a dinner a few weeks after they arrived. “I’d met Ken on my first trip to San Francisco, when I had a trunk show at Neiman’s at 22,” Posen recalls. “He came and took a look at the house and he couldn’t believe it. He said he’d help us, which was so incredibly kind.”

Fulk, speaking from his shabby-chic beach house in Provincetown, took a different approach on this project: no mood board, no concept presentation, no long meetings. “The cottage is delightfully imperfect,” he says. “There is this great bohemian quality to the place—when you go over there you really feel like you’ve run away and joined the circus.” Indeed, this does not look like a house an interior designer has messed around with: It is a home whose aesthetic can best be described as junk shop meets Central Saint Martins student bedsit—and is all the more charming for that. It already has the layers most people take decades to create. “It’s the anti-decorator’s decorator’s house,” Fulk says. “Everyone is so bored of perfection. This house is meant to look like someone actually lives there. Like they’ve been there forever already.”

The result is, literally, a mash-up of everything about the couple’s style, taste, backgrounds, and influences. The “crow’s nest” guest room at the top—whitewashed beams, sloping ceilings, a tall wicker lamp—is reminiscent of a Montauk beach shack that hasn’t been touched for decades. The primary bedroom, with views of the water, is dominated by a 1930s faux-bamboo bed and has the feel of an old-fashioned English country house: untidy bookcases, a Persian rug, a painting by Posen’s father, artist Stephen Posen. The kitchen, which the couple have not replaced, reads 1960s—worn cupboards repainted white, the 1950s O’Keefe & Merritt stove, a crimson stripe at cornice level. “There was a yellow scalloped border that Ken’s people did, but I didn’t like it so I painted over it, but I regret the color,” Ball says with a chuckle. The “mistakes,” the pair say, are part of the look.

In this age of over-curation, there is something comforting, perhaps even ahead of the zeitgeist, about the by-accident way the trio approached this home. The draped walls in the office came from leftover canvas Posen and Fulk were testing for a Banana Republic pop-up concept. The living room, anchored by two Deco armchairs, is dominated by a scarlet velvet sofa filched from a Banana Republic furniture line, as was the rust-colored Moroccan rug. The dressing room—with its old Persian rug and deeply unfashionable mahogany desk—is just wrong enough to be, well, cool. The campaign desks dotted about the house, a nod to the first seafaring owner, sit happily with the myriad objects—ornate lamps, funny chandeliers, over-the-top vases, patchwork tablecloths, peculiar cushions—gathered from local vintage stores by a pair of magpies constantly on the lookout for treasure.

Before the call ends, Ball says, “The cottage is not, like, particularly fancy. I don’t really love overdone stuff. It’s a rental, so there’s only so much we can do.” Then he adds, with a contented smile, “It is what it is.”

This story appears in the November issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.