Atelier Write’s Unravel is a Tokyo Hair Salon Built to Change its Mind.

In Tokyo’s Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, a neighbourhood better known for warehouses and specialty coffee than blow-dries, Atelier Write has reimagined what a hair salon can be. Unravel occupies a former timber warehouse, and rather than carving the cavernous space down to salon size, architect Takuya Sakamoto has leaned all the way into its scale.

Client Hiroyuki Nagae didn’t want a conventional salon. He wanted somewhere that could host seminars for fellow hairdressers, photoshoots and pop-ups from neighbouring shops—a space that earns its keep well beyond the daily cut and colour. Atelier Write’s answer is brilliantly simple: put the salon on rails.

Large mirrors and shelving units, each fitted with integrated power outlets, hang from overhead tracks. Pulled into the centre, they snap the room into a working salon. Pushed to the perimeter, they clear the floor for whatever comes next. The room reconfigures itself depending on the day, and the salon stops being a fixed thing and becomes something closer to a verb.

Salt Salon Borough Proves Commercial Spaces Can Be Cultural Destinations Too.

Unknown Works has reimagined the hair salon experience with Salt Salon Borough, transforming a Victorian warehouse into a three-level sonic playground.

The warehouse structure stays exactly as found, with new work kept to the barest minimum. Industrial steel racks—sourced from hardware supplier Monotaro—are repurposed as shampoo stations and reception, slotting into the building’s bones as though they’d always been there. The suspended mirrors and shelves wear an electro-galvanised finish: neutral enough to recede, sharp enough to register. A curtained VIP nook—dressed in Kvadrat fabric, with a Karimoku New Standard chair—adds a note of softness against all that raw steel.

Out front, a fully glazed steel sash fills the original shutter opening, so the whole performance plays out to the street. As Atelier Write describes it, the hope is that the space will “foster layered relationships between the salon and the city”—a salon that, over time, unravels into something far more civic.

Futurism and Footwear: Ura Tokyo by Insideout.

An innate sense of tranquillity comes to the fore at Ura Tokyo. A veil of fluorescent lighting, pierced by a mirrored obelisk-like mass breaks the boundary between inside and out.

[Images courtesy of Atelier Write. Photography by Kenta Hasegawa.]