Hair Salon 1975 / FATHOM

+ 17

Text description provided by the architects. This is a project to convert a property with a poor approach into a men’s salon on the third floor of a tenant building in an arcade in Naka Ward, Hiroshima City, which is entered from a closed and narrow spiral staircase. By using the poor visibility and approach as a backhand, the shop proposes fashion, art, and lifestyle that only those who arrive here can know. We wondered if we could create a space like a members-only online salon that only you know about and don’t want to share with others, making you want to come back again. The name of the shop is derived from the British musician of the same name, The 1975, and I had listened to his albums in the past, so music became a common image source with the client.

Increasing the repeat rate is an important factor in running a men’s salon, as the clients will continue to come back once they have decided to stay here, and gimmicks are needed to make them want to come back again. An unknown, closed place, a gimmick that makes clients keep coming back, and music as a common image – what emerged from these words was the act of digging for records. Even today, when subscriptions are commonplace, this style of digging is still alive and well, and each time you dig through a record, you become fascinated by the world of the record. By incorporating such a story, we hoped to create a men’s salon that is like a record shop, where you get hooked like a swamp every time you visit.

However, it is important to note that the clientele we are looking for are not the DJs and people with a deep knowledge of music who visit record shops. Analysis of the clientele of the affiliated shops showed that they are mainly neutral men who are interested in fashion, art, and beauty. Therefore, we scaled out the rows of record sleeves and arranged them as 34 large, transparent acrylic panels in an L-shape in the space to create a minimalist record shop made of transparent acrylic. The short side of the L-shape serves as a cutting space, where visitors spend most of their time. By embedding a fixed mirror stand in the centre of a series of transparent acrylics, the repetition of the transparent panels and the total reflection of the mirrors create an object that is a work of art and captivates the visitor for the duration of the treatment.

The long sides belong to the flexible space, so two sheets of transparent acrylic were sandwiched together and hung from the ceiling using hardware to softly divide the hair salon and gallery, with movable mirrors placed at equal intervals between them. Objects between the acrylics are joined using original hardware, and the transparency of the wall function makes it possible to display the artworks in multilayered layers. This space allows visitors to experience the various cultures proposed by the shop as a gallery or pop-up shop. The movable mirrors are usually housed in a series of acrylics, but when the mirrors are used, they can be pulled out like digging a record, transforming the space into a hair salon.

By suspending the original outlet boxes from the ceiling, the infrastructural function associated with the mirrors is made to disappear, and the idea was to allow the series of acrylics to float more in the space. The approach to the spiral staircase was made to look as if the entire space was luminescent in blue, the shop’s concept colour, due to its closed nature by using dark blue materreal.

The world you see as you walk up the stairs is a wide, bright, white space in contrast. The idea was to make the space closed by collapsing all existing openings in order to give the space a stronger sense of transparency and openness by continuously floating large acrylics and to take advantage of the poor location to embed a story that will remain strongly in the memories of visitors as a single experience.