[A-037]portlove

2025-2026
Tokyo
Gohongi

The property found by Masahiro Watanabe, a hair stylist who had decided to open a salon of his own, was a former dental clinic. It was a charming building with a small garden, blue-tiled exterior walls, and a glass-block entrance. In the garden grew kumquat, camellia, and Japanese maple trees.

I thought about what it feels like to have your hair cut.

You want a breeze to pass through and brush against your skin. You want to be wrapped in soft light. Better still, by a window, gazing absent-mindedly outside. You want to hear the sound of air moving. You want a scent as sweet as an oboe and as green as a meadow. You want the shampoo area to be softly dim, a little enclosed. Maybe even enough to drift off for a while.

Bright. Dark. Warm. Cool. Dry. Humid. Riding on the subtle qualities each place already possessed, we slid the dental clinic into a hair salon. Quietly, almost like a prank, so the building itself wouldn’t notice.

We left the reception exactly as it was. In the treatment room on the north side, the dental chairs gave way to shampoo stations. The dental laboratory would make a good staff room. The lead-lined X-ray room proved just right as a boiler room. On the mixing counter where disinfectants and anaesthetics once stood, perm solutions and hair dyes will now sit as though they’d always belonged there.

The large room overlooking the garden should have comfortable chairs for getting your hair cut. In fine weather, you would hope the windows would be left wide open. The large sliding doors that divided the room were removed, and mirrors were fitted in their place. The low wall built to support the mirrors was clad in woodgrain-printed plywood—a lookalike of the one in the corridor, like a game of spot the difference.

We gathered any additional furniture we needed from places like Facebook Marketplace and eBay. Together with the built-in cabinets and peeling wallpaper, everything was patched up and given a coat of paint. White, off-white, a greenish light grey, and a slightly muted lemon yellow. Cover everything with paint, and time, context and hierarchy dissolve, leaving nothing but this moment, this place, this thing. It somehow feels good.

To top it all off, we fashioned curtains from those salon capes you wear over your shoulders during a haircut, draping them across the room. Filled with air, the slightly puffed-up, pouch-shaped curtains catch the light and the breeze, billowing gently.

Not architecture, not interior design, not even space. An environment—is simply where one wants to have their hair cut.