Articles

Bringing the salon home

By Tatiana Boncompagni

Published: August 3 2007 13:34

It seems these days that everyone – not just the Jessica Simpsons and Victoria Beckhams of the world – wants a beauty entourage, the kind that starts with a Pilates instructor and ends with an eyelash extension guru. In other words, the same roster of beauty experts that any celebrity or it-girl worth her Louboutins has on her personal assistant’s speed dial.

So witness the rise of top-flight at-home beauty services, which doesn’t seem like too much for your average luxury-loving consumer to ask for these days. Not when concierge companies, designed to make our busy lives that much easier, abound.

New Yorkers, for example, can call on Fresh Direct, the online grocery store; Slate, a pick-up and deliver eco-conscious dry-cleaning and laundry service; and can even have a home fragrance specialist come to their apartment courtesy of L’Artisan Parfumeur.

Indeed, in a world in which convenience is king and personal service is paramount, why should anyone have to schlep to the salon or the spa for that pre-party blowout or monthly facial?

That’s what Susan Cunningham was asking herself, anyway, when she and her partner Courtney Yorio conceived Uptown Girl NYC, a recently launched beauty concierge business. It includes a small salon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a retinue of on-call hair and spa specialists, including some of the city’s most sought-after eyelash and hair-extension artists.

“We identified a need for a new trend in at-home beauty services for the quintessential cosmopolitan woman who can’t always break away to fit in salon time,” says Cunningham.

Take Vicki Pitcock, for example, a New York investment banker and mother of three young children. She receives regular house calls from a masseuse, yoga instructor, personal trainer and aesthetician, and recently added eyelash extensionist Yorio to her beauty entourage. “Considering the time it takes to get a taxi and come back, it’s much easier to find one hour in my schedule versus two,” says Pitcock.

Karen Grant, senior beauty industry analyst with NPD , a US market research company, links the increasing demand for at-home beauty services to the rise in internet shopping and popularity of spa parties. “This is part of a bigger phenomena of how people like to shop,” explains Grant. “They want convenience and highly specialised services.”

And it is not just businesses such as Uptown Girl that are cashing in on the trend. Other top salons and make-up artists in New York, Los Angeles and London are finding that a greater number of clients want to receive their services in the comfort of their own homes. This despite prices that are sometimes double or triple what the same service would cost in the salon.

“There’s so much money sloshing around right now,” says John Barrett, whose eponymous salon occupies the penthouse floor of New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store, explaining why his clients do not mind spending $300 for an at-home or in-office blow dry that would cost $100 in his salon.

“It’s all about convenience, but it’s also the concept of celebrity culture. Everybody wants to be a VIP,” says Brian Cantor, owner of Manhattan’s Paul Labrecque Salon and Spa, which has seen 25 per cent annual growth in its “Paul On the Go” business since the launch in 2001.

In Los Angeles, the hair salon Privé, which charges $125 for travel costs, plus $250 per hour for services, reports a 30 per cent increase in its out-of-salon business. Its sister spa, Ona, recently launched “Ona on Wheels,” for its more privacy-sensitive and time-pressed clientele.

“It used to be special circumstances where celebrities or VIPs would require services to prepare for an event, photo shoot or weddings, but now we are finding that more and more business women, mothers, etc. are looking to consolidate and multi- task their duties,” says Laurent Dufourg of Privé. Likewise, Daniel Sandler, a London-based makeup artist and cosmetics entrepreneur, recently assembled a team of 30 make-up artists who travel across Britain to clients’ homes to apply make-up or give personalised how-to lessons.

Of course, there are limits to what can or should be done out of the spa. Philippa Holland, a London-based jewellery designer, has kickboxing lessons, massages and manicures and pedicures in her home but draws the line with hair colour and waxing because “it would be very messy”.

Others counsel that you don’t always get the level of service at your home as you would on-site – no head massages at the shampoo station, for example, or a complimentary glass of champagne or paraffin wax treatment during a manicure.

In response to this, some hair stylists are finding a kind of middle ground between providing services in a client’s home and in the salon. Paul Podlucky, a renowned New York hair-stylist and make-up artist, gives $400 haircuts (long layers are a speciality) out of his prewar apartment on the Upper East Side.

Ashley Javier, meanwhile, an up-and-coming New York-based hair-stylist, leases two penthouses in a midtown building, one as his apartment and the other as his “parlor,” where he frequently hosts getting-ready-for-the party evenings for girls-about-town. “It’s much cooler than a salon,” says Javier about his ultra-private atelier.