"A refined and professional interior design that seamlessly blends tradition with modernity—elegant, functional, and rich with aesthetic sensitivity."
-------- Review from Future Art & Design Award
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Project description
SS Hair
A Studio Reimagined: From Blank Space to Temporal Narrative
SS Hair is an adaptive reuse project that transforms a bland, characterless space into a poetic salon inspired by time, imperfection, and artistic freedom. The design does not mimic the past—it constructs a memory of it.
At the heart of the concept is the illusion of age. Rather than using prefabricated finishes or faux patinas, the walls were painted by a local artist using traditional brush techniques to simulate peeling plaster, cracks, and watermarks—transforming the blank canvas into a textured narrative of time and wear. These aren’t historical remnants; they’re deliberate acts of storytelling through surface.
The architectural intervention includes enlarging the doorways—originally under 180cm tall—by manually sketching custom asymmetrical openings onto the walls. These lines, drawn by the designer on-site, were chiseled by hand over time, creating rugged thresholds that blur the boundary between control and erosion, human precision and material resistance.
In contrast to typical salon configurations, SS Hair resists rigid layout. Every styling station is movable, featuring full-length mirrors on wheels that allow fluid reconfiguration and a casual, lived-in aesthetic. The VIP room features custom-cut mirrored panels shaped by laser into jagged, broken-edge forms—creating a spatial mirage of fragmentation and reflection.
The washing area plays with contradiction. Instead of a sterile, monolithic luxury finish, the floor is patchworked with mixed tiles and cement grout—a handcrafted ‘repair aesthetic’ that injects warmth, irregularity, and intimacy. Adjacent to this is the color-mixing station, demarcated not by walls but by translucent glass bricks and an intentionally unfinished wall surface, maintaining both visual permeability and a sense of evolving utility.
This project challenges conventional notions of beauty and polish within commercial interiors. It embraces the unfinished, the imperfect, and the evolving. SS Hair is not a space frozen in completion—it is a living composition that changes with use, mood, and light.