Ask yourself, are you prepared to enter the world of in-home hair salons costing as much as $30K, some of them in the blandest of Salt Lake City mansions, but modeled after the spas in Maui hotels? Because the Wall Street Journal has published another classic Wall Street Journal mansion-amenity trend piece, but this time it's about GOOD HAIR.
Personal salon owners have all kinds of justifications for owning personal salons—all the "chaos going on" in normal salons and their lame no-cellphone policies, the ability to host "spa parties" and "fundraisers," the opportunity to spend more time with the kids (though doing so while your stylist makes a house call is "not as relaxing" as it otherwise would be, obviously). For these reasons, and undoubtedly for some they would be kind of ashamed to go on the record about (like "I wanted one"), these families incur sums in the many thousands of dollars.
Builder Andrew Johnson, owner of Jadee Construction in Hot Springs, Ark., estimates that the 450-square-foot hair salon he put into a $7 million house for a client last year cost about $30,000. Big-ticket items include two pedicure chairs that cost about $5,000 apiece. There are also two manicure stations, a hair-washing basin and a leather chair on rollers for haircuts. He is currently putting in another private salon in a 4,000-square-foot home under construction in Hot Springs. Tiphany Weeks, wife of second baseman Rickie Weeks, frames hers as part of a "woman cave," a refrain that avid readers will recognize from the way people talked about Theresa Roemer's three-story closet. Which, after having installed, she attempted to flip, along with the rest of her Texas mansion, with a $10M bump in price. But some real estate professionals question the wisdom of private salons.
Not all agents agree on what private salons contribute to resale values. Tamara Bourne, with Keller Williams Realty in Peachtree City, Ga., has had several listings with hair salons and says they're "hard as heck" to sell and get lots of funny comments. "It's kind of a freaky thing," she says. Honestly there are much freakier things in this world.
(Also Madonna has one.)
· Latest Style: Home Hair Salons [WSJ]
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