Welcome to Salt, a London hair salon-turned-immersive audio experience

Audio experiences are all the rage right now, with listening bars, for example, having a real moment. Unknown Works has brought this principle to a surprising new setting: a London hair salon.

The local architecture studio was behind the design of the second outpost of hairdresser Salt, housed within a former Victorian storehouse in Borough. The space is now both a sleek salon and a cultural hub, where music, sound design and hospitality converge. ‘The brief for Salt Salon Borough was to bring all the things we already do – hair, sound, music, drinks – and elevate it to a completely new level,’ says founder John Paul Scott. ‘I wanted to do something that would shock people… which would put Salt on the map.’

Spanning three floors, each with its own function, the interior incorporates a sound system offering tailored sonic environments that evolve throughout the day – calming ambient tones in the morning, richer textures in the afternoon, and immersive soundscapes by evening.

The first floor is home to a ‘listening room’, which operates as a conventional salon during the day, with cutting stations and a reception area, but transforms at night into a venue for performances, talks and listening events. A pair of huge galvanised steel loudspeakers, crafted using roboforming – a low-energy, digitally controlled metal-forming technique – were developed in collaboration with audio start-up Friendly Pressure. To make the speakers, Unknown Works salvaged metal from Blythe House, the former archival facility for the V&A, the Science Museum and the British Museum (the studio used the same components for the Science Museum’s Energy Revolution Gallery, which opened in early 2024).

The second floor – known as the ‘cutting floor’ – features an open-plan layout anchored by a continuous stainless steel mirror that shifts from buffed and mottled for privacy to highly polished for reflection. Sound is delivered through suspended Friendly Pressure Pickney loudspeakers, while silicone acoustic screens create audio separation between work and staff areas.

On the top floor – the ‘colour floor’ – a striking, half-tonne mirror workstation is suspended from the original timber rafters. Made from ultra-bright stainless steel, it also functions as a light diffuser. Over time, the flooring on this level is intended to bear the traces of the salon’s creativity – hair dye will gradually form a kind of patina.

Sound is embedded into every detail of the design of Salt: aside from the obvious heavy-duty tech, modular chairs made from recycled foam are engineered to absorb low-frequency sound, while floor-to-ceiling silicone panels enhance acoustic clarity. Even the layout has been tuned to make the space a resonant body – essentially transforming the building itself into an instrument.

‘This storehouse has been boldly reimagined as a space where sound operates as both material and medium,’ says Ben Hayes, director of Unknown Works. ‘Every element, from the bespoke loudspeakers to the acoustic furniture, has been precisely tuned to create an entirely new salon experience. It's a fundamental rethinking of what these spaces can be.’