The Salt Salon interprets the hair salon as a space of acoustic experience. How did this idea come about?
Ben Hayes: The three founders of Unknown Works are real music enthusiasts. We spend a lot of our personal time exploring music and we listen to music constantly in the studio. Sound is part of our culture. When we met John Paul Scott, the owner of Salt and a former electronic music producer, there was an immediate alignment. We began discussing how sound could shape the experience of his second salon down in Borough Market.
What other key factors influenced the concept?
BH: We asked what a salon should be in 2025 or 2030. As high streets and social habits change, salons have become key social spaces in London. They are places for conversation and cultural exchange, not just services. Programming was the catalyst. Without it, the project would just be a nice space with good speakers. Events, music, talks, and gatherings give the architecture meaning. Salt Salon can host album launches, radio shows, podcasts, wellness days, talks, and parties. The design supports future uses rather than determining the space too tightly.
How did this decision affect the spatial structure?
BH: The salon occupies three floors in a historic Victorian grain storehouse. The entry floor is the listening space – an event room with custom speakers, modular furniture, and a mobile bar that can become a DJ booth or reception desk. The next floor is the cutting room, and the top floor is the colour room, which is intentionally restrained. The floor is allowed to stain over time from dyes, and a large suspended stainless steel mirror creates different seating bays and defines the space.
To what extent did the historic character of the building influence the design?
BH: We retained original joists, trapdoors, and traces of how goods were once moved through the building. A translucent glass element connects the listening and cutting spaces, maintaining a vertical relationship between levels.
How does sound translate into architectural decisions?
BH: There’s acoustic material between the joists, and the modular furniture – made from compressed recycled foam – also tunes the room acoustically. The asymmetrical geometry of the existing building improves sound performance. The journey from the noisy food market into the quiet stairwell and then into the salon creates an acoustic transition. Music changes throughout the day, shaping mood and pace, so each visit feels different. The architecture recedes, allowing sound to take precedene.
Why were the speakers made of galvanized steel?
BH: The brief demanded extremely durable materials. Salons are cleaned multiple times a day with strong chemicals, so timber wasn’t suitable. We wanted a robust material that could sit alongside the historic brick and timber without imitating it. Metal offered that contrast.
Metal raises sustainability concerns, doesn’t it?
BH: All the galvanised panels come from recycled museum shelving from Blythe House, once used by the V&A and Science Museum. We’d already tested these industrial racks in earlier projects, so we knew their potential. Recycled metal comes in fixed forms. Incremental sheet forming allows us to coldform metal into complex shapes using robotic or CNC processes, with low energy input. But metal has memory. It wants to spring back. The speaker horns required highest precision, so we had to form them from both sides, scan the results, and realign them digitally with the 3D-printed horn bases. The jigs often broke under the force required. We went through a “graveyard” of failed shelves before getting it right.
Did fabrication logic shape the design, or vice versa?
BH: They met in the middle. We worked closely with loudspeaker specialists Friendly Pressure to align acoustic performance with material constraints. The metal front follows the horn geometry, but transitions into a 3D-printed horn base inside a timber enclosure. Most of the acoustic work happens inside the timber and 3D-printed horn. The metal only engages briefly as sound exits.
Digital fabrication promises precision, yet Salt also embraces patina and ageing. How do they coexist?
BH: The old building is allowed to age – floors, joists, brick – while the new elements are digitally precise. That contrast reflects conservation principles: don’t imitate the old, complement it with clarity. Theo Games Petrohilos: It’s also musical. Music is precise, but it’s temporal and open to change. During fabrication we sometimes discovered unexpected traces of processing and preserved them. The tension between control and surprise matters to us.
How central are computational design tools to the way Unknown Works develops form?
TGP: If a digital tool allows us to extend what we can do, then yes, we use it, but we always move back and forth between digital and analogue methods. We constantly return to sketching and talking. BH: Mock-ups and prototyping are essential. Without them, you risk becoming detached from how things are actually made. We move to full-scale prototypes as early as possible and work with fabricators from the start. Feedback is critical. Without it, you don’t really learn anything. We assume failure and change from the outset. TGP: And we’re not afraid to pivot by changing materials, technologies, or methods if needed. What matters is remaining open and responsive.
Did AI play any role in this project?
BH: We use AI for workflow and research, but not yet for geometry. The precision and control aren’t there. It’s useful early on, but to us it has limits as a design tool.
Will AI shift the future role of architects?
BH: Certainly. But I hope it works alongside us, not instead of us. Architecture is collaborative, materialdriven, and rooted in making. That’s hard to replace. TGP: Whether in a harmonious or discursive way, architects bring many elements together. That curatorial role – composing, evaluating, iterating, questioning – will still exist, whether you have AI or not.
What skills will architects need most of all in the next decade?
TGP: Intuition. A critical mind. The ability to see a spark of something, choose it, and take it further with persistence. BH: The exciting question is: Does AI generate anything original? The ability to improvise is key. Bringing it back to music, we see ourselves more like
a free jazz ensemble than an orchestra – allowing chaos and serendipity.
