Designer Ken Fulk's West Marin inn portfolio, anchored by the storied Manka's Inverness Lodge, faces an August trustee's sale over a defaulted $7.1M loan and $17M-plus in recorded debt. The widely cited "$76 million" is a damages claim in Fulk's own lawsuit — not a verified loss.

Ken Fulk, the San Francisco designer who builds fantasy interiors for tech billionaires, is losing the West Marin hospitality portfolio he spent years assembling — and the "$76 million" attached to the collapse is not a loss anyone has verified. It is the damages figure Fulk himself is claiming, as a plaintiff.

Here is what's on the record. In 2022, Fulk's development company InHouse — co-founded with Austin investor Clark Lyda — bought four inns around Inverness and Olema from the late innkeeper Margaret Grade, including the mythic Manka's Inverness Lodge, for a reported $13.3 million. A $7.1 million renovation loan followed. That loan matured unpaid in April 2025, and the lender recorded a notice of default in Marin County putting the balance above $17 million, according to the SF Standard's reporting. A trustee's sale is set for mid-August.

The cap-table detail that matters: the $7.1 million was cross-collateralized against three out-of-state luxury inns, so a single default threatens a roughly $27 million portfolio — one that is already unwinding. Blantyre, in the Massachusetts Berkshires, sold in February for $14 million. And the lender, Seattle's Fairview Partners Investment Management, had its California Finance Lenders license revoked by state regulators in March 2023 — a public order from the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, predating the default it is now enforcing.

The $76 million is a separate matter. In an April lawsuit against Grade's estate and her former partner Daniel DeLong, Fulk alleges embezzlement, concealed hotel taxes, and zoning failures totaling that sum. It's an allegation in a complaint, not an adjudicated loss — the distinction the round number erases.

What to watch: whether the August trustee's sale actually takes Manka's. Fulk's spokesperson says he doesn't expect it to sell. The Marin case number isn't public, and the financial narrative still rests largely on one outlet's read of the deeds.