NEON Hair Salon

NEON Hair Salon | Fujisawa, Japan | 2022
[Atsushi Tasaki Architecture and Design]

The design of the hair salon facing the shopping district near Kugenuma Kaigan Station in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. A diverse range of people, including commuters, schoolgoers, surfers, and skaters walk through this shopping district.

The salon was designed to occupy the first floor of a newly built building by a major home builder. The first floor is the salon, while the second and third floors are residential, with each having entrances facing the street. The building’s exterior is composed of siding and aluminum sash, an efficient construction common in Japan, and familiar to people who grew up in the suburbs.

While I do harbor some reservations about such industrialized scenery, I recognize that to us, these have become nostalgic scenes. I thought about how to approach such contradictory nostalgic landscapes.

The client’s only requests were to ensure the necessary number of seats were available, and to make it look unlike a typical beauty salon. Since a narrow entryway leads into a wide room, there was limited freedom with approaching the floor plan, since installing the necessary facilities naturally fills most of the space.

Finding slightly unusual uses for off-the-shelf parts and standard materials lent a slight sense of strangeness to the space and the things within it. While hewing close to a standard appearance, I aimed to create a space that would cause those using it to notice it looked somewhat different.

I produced a design that deviates from the expected affordances in use and scale, with LGS-covered walls and movable tables with electrical outlets, stools made of tiles that protrude from the floor and match the floor’s tile joints, lighting that doubles as a hanger rack, etc.

While the overall tone tended towards the building-like, the use of polycarbonate created a subtle sense of contrast, while successive linear light fixtures guided the onlooker’s gaze from the street, piquing interest in the salon and evoking a slight sense of the strange. Text description by the architects.