FTV Salon
As Built
Black leather at every station, white marble laid in bands so the walking line stays legible when the floor is full, and amber chandeliers over the length of the room. Photographed after handover.
What follows is how it got there. The plan first, then the same rooms while they were still a building site.
The Room We Were Given
The shell was one room, 11.2 metres by 15.4, with its only frontage on the short side and glazed floor to ceiling. A salon this shape has to settle three arguments at once. Wet work wants the back, where the drainage already runs. Mirrors want wall. And the front has to sell before it services.
So the plan reads one way in trade and the other way in service. Reception sits just inside the glass on a curved counter, with a consultants room tucked either side of the door so a conversation about colour does not happen in the middle of the floor. Behind it, the brand wall and its screen. Then the waiting lounge. Then work.
Eight Mirrors and a Middle
Styling runs down both long walls, four stations a side. Colouring sits in the centre of the room where nobody needs a wall, set out in two circles so a colourist works around a chair rather than along it. Backwash goes at the far end, three chairs against the one wall in the room with no daylight on it, which is the right wall to lose.
Retail takes the corners the working floor does not want. A retail lounge on one side, an exclusive zone on the other, and the toilets and pantry pushed into the back corners where the services already are and the sightline from the door does not reach.
Where the Brand Goes
FashionTV licenses a name and the name carries a mark. Repeat a mark often enough and it stops being one, so it appears here three times and each appearance does different work.
At the threshold it is cut in white neon across black marble at full height, angled as a chevron so it reads through the glass from the road. Along the walls it becomes hexagonal niches in dark laminate, deep enough to hold stock and shallow enough not to take floor. On the front of the counter it is a single faceted panel. After that we stopped.
Brass fins run floor to ceiling in two screens between the front of house and the wash bays. A fin screen is transparent when you move past it and solid when you sit still, which is the right way round in a room where the staff move and the clients do not.
On Site
On site. The neon was wired and tested before the floors went down, which is the only sensible order: a light line set into stone cannot be moved once the stone is laid.
