A salon with character

The beauty salon in Voiron, a small municipality in the Isère department in south-east France, is no ordinary high-street beauty shop. This, after all, is not un salon, it’s Le Salon, and as the name suggests, it’s as distinctive and fashionable as the clientèle it serves. Its clear statement of intent goes well beyond beauty treatments, and embraces an entire lifestyle that’s reflected in the unique design of the boutique. Created by a firm of architects who took care of the project from start to finish, including the furnishings and décor, the interior design embodies the very soul of the business.
The designers, from the firm Cadypso, describe the environment as neo-Baroque and « as sparkling as its owners », and they created it by deploying a combination of original materials, bold colours and large, floor-to-ceiling windows that flood the salon with light and bring it into direct visual contact with the street outside. The result is anything but another cold, stark, high-street hair salon, because its atmosphere is strikingly warm and intimate. Based on a harmonious blend of disparate coverings, fabrics and furnishings, the interior design echoes the styling of numerous shops and cafés that have eschewed the traditional look of public premises in recent years, and opted instead to replicate the intimate atmosphere of a domestic setting.
The leitmotif of the design is the variety of patterns, colours and languages used, starting from the furnishing, which includes neo-vintage coffee tables with wooden legs and decorated tops, armchairs upholstered in light blue fabric, table lamps with perforated shades, and cascades of pendant ceiling lamps. The designers decided to strike a contrast between the walls that accommodate the workstations and the ones on the street frontage, with the windows in them. The former are finished with wallpaper inspired by fabrics with retro decorative motifs, while the latter have a rustic look based on exposed, light-coloured, irregularly hewn stone, adorned with a large mirror with a silver frame. Large, framed mirrors also mark the defining feature of each workstation, while vintage photos in small frames are scattered around the walls above the mirrors in a deliberately random pattern. The most eye-catching and distinctive feature is the bold colour scheme of the flooring. This was created with Trace metallic-effect porcelain tiles by Caesar, in the colour Mint, whose irregular graphics enhance the multi-coloured patterns produced by the oxidation of copper. These tiles provide the necessary technical performance for premises of this type, while also reflecting the natural light and emphasising the original character of the salon, with their powerful aesthetic.