FOOYUU Hair Salon

FOOYUU is a hair salon in Hsinchu, Taiwan. In Mandarin the name means to give blessing, and said aloud it sounds like "for you" — both readings describe what passes between two people through a pair of hands and a pair of scissors.

The salon came to us with a divided audience. Senior stylists hold a loyal clientele in their thirties and forties, while junior designers are building a younger one. The two groups want different things from the same visit: newcomers respond to an open, current room, long-standing clients to a familiar one, warm and worked by hand.

Rather than divide the plan or the price list, we divided the building. Both floors share one palette — stainless steel, solid wood, and the original walls — and differ only in proportion. Downstairs, metal reads first across eight styling seats, and the room sits open to the street, where a first-time visitor can see in before deciding to come in. Upstairs, wood takes over, covering the floor as well as the furniture, and ten seats sit in a quieter room for clients who have come here for years. The vocabulary never changes. Only the temperature does.

Flat lines and simple blocks keep both floors closer to a contemporary art museum than to a salon, neutral enough that each group finds its own reason to like it. Material follows use: solid wood does the supporting work in cabinets and columns, stainless steel takes the working surfaces and storage ledges where water and product land. Mirrors work twice, as the stylist's instrument and as the partitions that divide the seats without closing the rooms in. Generous openings carry daylight through both floors, and the artificial layer adds even, shadow-free light at every chair.

Parts of the original wall were kept where the composition asked for them, and repainted with the rest. Reclaimed pieces carry structural work: a salvaged cabinet base supports the counter, vintage cabinets sit on new steel platforms, antique shoe racks became furniture bases. Each arrived with its own wear, and that wear is now part of the room.