MR PORTER travels to San Francisco to check in with some of our favourite locals.

Milanese men dress elegantly with every detail considered. Parisians tend to play it cool and casual. But what does it mean when we say that someone embodies San Francisco style? To outsiders the city is often reduced to a tension – high tech vs old money or Bohemians vs billionaires, but the truth is far more nuanced. To get a better sense of the city’s vibe, we checked in with five locals – Mr Trevor Traina (the CEO of IfOnly), chef Mr Mourad Lahlou, Mr Daniel Lurie (the founder of the Tipping Point Community charity), wine and food entrepreneur Mr Joel Gott and Mr Ken Fulk, the interior designer who masterminded Mr Sean Parker’s Middle Earth-meets-Narnia wedding in Big Sur.

To the man they all take great pride in the fact that theirs is a city of staggering beauty. A place where generations of intrepid urban planners have carved neighbourhoods out of vertiginous topography, resulting in the sloping roads that made Mr Steve McQueen’s Mustang GT take flight in Bullitt. The inhabitants of most cities can be broken down into tribes based on industry or social pedigree, but the San Franciscans believe that their city is both a “true melting pot” (as Mr Lahlou, a Marrakech-born transplant, puts it) and something greater. “If I were growing up in Puglia in the 14th century, I would figure out how to get myself to Florence and be part of the Renaissance,” says Mr Traina of his hometown’s allure. “San Francisco is the Florence of our times. From Tesla to the iPhone, from Google to Uber, these things that are changing the world were all invented here.”

CEO of IfOnly.com ifonly.com

Mr Trevor Traina’s ostensible job title is the CEO of IfOnly, a website that offers its users the chance to purchase singular private experiences (think a private coaching session from San Francisco 49ers star quarterback Mr Colin Kaepernick), with a share of the proceeds going to charity. But behind the scenes Mr Traina is a master at connecting and collecting.

As a connector, the 46 year old has had great success bridging the gap between the city’s old and new money. Like his new high-tech neighbours, Mr Traina sold his first dotcom, CompareNet, to Microsoft for $100m at the age of 30. Like the city’s established families, his forebears arrived in the city during the Gold Rush, and his parents were fixtures on the social scene. Taking a walk through the city with him becomes an impromptu social studies class peppered with gossip. “That’s the building where Philo Farnsworth invented television” is quickly followed by a stop to show where one of the city’s notorious saloons ran a side business in shanghai-ing sailors.

As a collector his interest runs to art and cars. His photo collection was the subject of a show titled “Real to Real” at the city’s de Young Museum. His office features works by photographer Ms Nan Goldin and painter Mr Ed Ruscha. Cars are another passion: mixed in with pictures of his two children on his iPhone are shots of his 1971 Ford Ranger XLT pick-up, a 1957 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider and a vintage Mercedes grand limousine to name a few. In 2008 in an attempt to promote another website he founded called DriverSide, he drove an Audi R8 through China as part of the Gumball 3000 Rally.

His usual workday uniform consists of blazer and jeans, but he accessorises with cufflinks and pocket scarves – a habit he picked up from his late father who was an avid collector of both Fabergé cigarette cases and jewelled cufflinks – so much so that Sotheby’s devoted a posthumous auction to his man bling. Mr Traina still occasionally wears a blue blazer his father gave him. “My father told me that every man needs a blue blazer, but not everyone needs one with gold buttons,” he says of the wardrobe staple. When asked what passes for San Francisco style, this scion of one of its best-dressed dynasties responds, “San Francisco is more about a mentality than a style. There’s a deeply traditional side to the city, but it is also more fluid than a lot of east coast cities. The establishment here is curious to meet the new, dynamic people, and the new, dynamic people seem curious to meet the establishment.”

Interior designer and decorator kenfulk.com

Since arriving in San Francisco in 1997, Mr Fulk’s projects have included the interior design and creative direction for The Battery, a five-level, private social club that opened in a turn-of-the-century former sweet factory in 2013 and is replete with a health club, library, wine-tasting room and a bar with a buzzy networking scene. Currently he is working on a revamp of the public spaces in the iconic Mark Hopkins hotel as well as the interior of a new skyscraper in New York’s Hudson Yards development. But one of the more interesting aspects of his business is that it goes that little bit further than interior decoration. In fact, he’s a specialist in curating entire lifestyles for San Francisco’s technorati who, after a consultation period, are in the habit of giving Mr Fulk carte blanche to furnish their homes and purchase their wardrobes.“We go on what I call ‘play dates’ where I get to know the clients and then have them fill out The Fulkian Questionnaire,” he says. “I ask things like ‘What’s your favourite hotel?’”

Mr Fulk, 49, has been interested in aesthetics since he was a boy growing up in the American South. He can remember shopping for his own clothes at age six and honing his sensibility helping his mother with table settings and big holiday party plans. Currently, he works out of a 15,000sqft industrial space in the South of Market district which he calls “the magic factory”. Spread over four floors, the former S&M leather factory, which made couture leather clothing for the bondage set, has a ground-floor section called Peep Show, an appointment-only purveyor of antiques (leopard skin-lined handcuffs, anyone?). The second floor is a library and work space, the third is occupied by designers and architects while the top features an entertaining area, replete with oversize floral arrangements, vintage antiques and lots of taxidermy from Deyrolle in Paris, plus Mr Fulk’s private office and loft.

Mr Fulk’s personal style, heavily weighted to bespoke and bow ties, is now part of his brand. “I had created this super-interesting job for myself, so I started dressing the part.” As for his take on his adopted city’s style, he says, “We’ve outgrown the hoodie culture. My clients care about good design and quality, not labels.”

CEO and founder, Tipping Point Community tippingpoint.org

What if some of the same thinking that helped create game-changing technologies was applied to societal ills including homelessness or at-risk children? That is the concept behind “T Lab”, just one of the innovative approaches that Mr Lurie’s non-profit Tipping Point Community is bringing to philanthropy. Each year, T Lab brings together nine full-time employees for six months to come up with solutions such as “GMA Village” (short for Grandma Village) – a Lyft-esque prototype meant to match grandmothers with working parents who need help but have no options for childcare.

Mr Lurie, 38, was born into a San Francisco family of do-gooders. His father, Mr Brian Lurie, is a rabbi and sits on the board of the New Israel Fund. His stepmother, Ms Caroline Fromm Lurie, supports continuing education through her family’s foundation, the Fromm Institute. His mother and late stepfather, Ms Mimi and Mr Peter Haas, were major supporters of Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service.

After graduating from Duke University and working on Mr Bill Bradley’s 2000 presidential campaign, Mr Lurie went to work for the Robin Hood Foundation in New York, a charity with a heavy Wall Street donor base, that fights poverty and helps people affected by disasters such as 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. He moved home two years later and after a stint in graduate school at Berkeley, he launched Tipping Point in 2005 based on the idea that “low-income families deserve access to the most effective services that can help them break the cycle of poverty for good, and donors deserve a return on their philanthropic investments”.

He bristles at the dotcom-vintage sobriquet “venture philanthropist” preferring “engaged grant maker” for the way Tipping Point rigorously screens the 47 local non-profits it supports and stays very involved in its investments. Another point of difference is that the board covers the fundraising and operation costs, so every dollar donated goes to poverty fighting organisations. Mr Lurie and his wife Ms Becca Prowda, a Levi’s executive, think a lot about the city that they will leave behind to their two small children. Having chaired the city’s successful bid to host Super Bowl 2016, locals wonder when he might run for a political office.

“I love my job,” is all he will say on the topic for now.

Chef and owner, Mourad mouradsf.com

The chef, who in this food-obsessed city is widely touted as the next big thing, owes his success to homesickness. He left his native Marrakech at 17 and flew to San Francisco to study economics, first as an undergraduate and then as a grad student at the University of San Francisco. His path to a job at The World Bank then took a detour. “I started cooking for myself and I was making dishes from the memories of being in my mother’s kitchen,” he explains. “She was a single mother, and we spent a lot of time together.” In grad school he began cooking for his professors who suggested he open a restaurant. In 1996 he had $3,700 to his name and opened a small place called Kasbah in the suburb of San Rafael with just a dishwasher and a prep cook to keep him company in the kitchen.

After a rave review from influential food critic Mr Michael Bauer at the San Francisco Chronicle, his brand of Moroccan-influenced California cuisine was launched. By 2001, he opened Aziza (his mother’s name) in a former Mexican restaurant. Finally, at age 46, he has just opened his namesake Mourad, a 180-seat restaurant with tile floors and a glass-walled wine cage suspended over a marble bar in the newly renovated Pacific Bell building, an Art Deco gem where Yelp also has its HQ. San Francisco’s taste level is different from other major cities, he says. “This city feels like the epicentre of the intellectual revolution – a place where people are becoming incredibly wealthy from coming up with the ideas that will change the world in the next 50 years. But the people who are responsible for these ideas, they don’t become rich and change. They remain extremely low-key. You could be sitting on a bench next to someone in the park and you can’t always be sure whether they are a bum or billionaire.”

Wine and food entrepreneur gottwines.com

When launching his winery in 1996, Mr Gott wanted to make a $15-$20 bottle of wine that tasted as good as wines twice its price. He had an advantage. As the third generation in his family to work in California’s vineyards, his blood flowed purple.

His grandfather had worked for Inglenook. His parents started Montevina Winery. His father eventually became president of Sterling (one of the vineyards that helped launch Napa as a player on the global wine stage and now is part of the Diageo empire). “A lot of the old farmers remember me from riding on tractors as a little boy, and I loved seeing the cycle of growth from vine to pruning to leaf to bud…” he recalls. His first wine, a 1996 Zinfandel, was a true friends and family affair. The grapes came from Mr Tom Dillian, whose family’s farm in Amador County had Zinfandel vines dating back to the 1920s. Mr Gott’s wife, Sarah, winemaker for Joseph Phelps, crafted the wine. “We were either young enough or dumb enough to think we could do this,” he recalls of the wine that put him on the map.

By 1999, their Zinfandel had a loyal following and they branched out into other reasonably priced and tasty varietals – a Sauvignon Blanc and a Cabernet. He had also always had a hand in the food business: when the hamburger stand where he had hung out in high school went out of business for the third time, he decided to take it on. “I didn’t want to serve cheap crap, so I sourced really good ingredients and did things like put a piece of Ahi tuna on a bun because Sarah wasn’t going to eat a hamburger, but if we had sushi grade tuna...” Today Gott’s Roadside has four locations in the Bay Area and is often cited as an inspiration for the publicly traded, upscale burger chain Shake Shack. Mr Gott always has multiple burners going and other projects include Three Thieves, a winery in which he is a partner whose mission is to produce tasty wine including the Bandit range (wines that come in eco-friendly juice boxes) and 1.5litre bottles of Sauvignon Blanc called XL. “I remember my grandfather telling me about there being employee-only jug wine made from quality fruit when he worked at Inglenook. With the big bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, I kind of feel that my partners have gone full-circle.”