In Japan, it's not enough to merely cut hair or paint nails: beauty parlors have to look appealing, too. There are more than 170,000 "aesthetic salons" duking it out over billions in annual revenues. Salon owners hope that creative designs can give them the necessary edge on the competition, often splurging to hire well-known architects. Indeed, Japan's beauty parlors can be glorious affairs, where geometric forms abound, screens shield any and every treatment, and there's zero art on the walls. For a while now, the country's favored design style has been minimalism, with sterile white boxes with clean lines popping up seemingly everywhere. However, many of the salons veer away from pure minimalism, incorporating more daring elements like swooping aluminum sculptural ceilings, Swiss-cheese perforated walls and even whole trunks of birch trees into their designs.
· 17 Projects Proving Nobody Does Minimalism Quite Like Japan [Curbed National]
· All Japan coverage [Curbed National]
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