Dinosaurs roaming, animals clinging precariously to climbing vines and an imaginary girl in a beautiful dress with a painted smile looks on perpetually as a grandfather clock tick-tocks the time away. No, this isn’t an episode of Lost. This is Scarlet Moon, a salon which is anything but ordinary.
Martin Fox and Dean Bradwell had a dream. It was a big dream, a creative salon dream, demanding 16 inventive hours a day, with the remainder of their time spent trawling the internet for inspiration and ideas. This dream needed a name and Martin wanted it to be meaningful.
“I wanted to name the salon after my daughter, so we called it Scarlet,” says Martin, “but as co-owner, Dean came up with the other half of the name – Moon.”
When Martin and Dean began searching for the building that would capture their creative business, they came across a rather run down looking terraced house. It was built in 1879 and had lots of character, but had been empty for three years with no central heating – very primitive!
Scarlet Moon wasn’t designed by some high-flying interior designer – it was pretty much created via cyber space: “We designed the interior via e-mail,” says Martin, “Dean and I sent drawings back and forth between the two of us; we didn’t sit down with an architect.” The building was planned to serve two purposes: “I also have a photography business,” says Martin, “so upstairs is my studio for art photography and printing and downstairs is the salon.”
“We got a lot of vintage furniture, which suits the period of the building,” says Martin. “Contradicting this, the backwashes (from Aston and Fincher) are brand new and look interesting when juxtaposed the old.”
This type of creative thinking has also crept into other aspects of the interior, as the salon has an evolving choice of art. “The artist – Dave Earl – who shows a lot of the art on our walls, also spray painted our Manga girl onto the wall.”
Like all the details in the salon, Martin and Dean painted the walls themselves: “We painted the walls different colours – of course we used scarlet, light blues and duck egg green. I want to constantly change it, because we do get bored.”
Courtesy of Sarah Andrews @ Salon Business.