Paint Salon is a boutique, women-owned beauty salon with an emphasis on clean beauty and sustainable employment practices. The programmatic requirements of any salon are innately clear, however, accepting what a salon typology should look like wouldn’t necessarily speak to the brand and vision of this particular business. Using an unassuming color pallet and embracing the natural properties of the Birch and Maple wood used throughout, the design is meant to convey the salon’s high-end services whilst creating a calming atmosphere to allow a denizen to feel like a guest rather than a client or employee. The computer was the initial tool used to generate construction documents that could communicate instruction to our subcontractors, but the pencil became the essential tool at all phases of construction. Because I, along with the two owners, assumed the role of General Contractor(s), we shouldered much of the work ourselves and took a design-build approach with each subcontractor as needed. The latter required many impromptu site visits and on-site sketches to achieve a detail by working with the contractor and not directing the contractor, which would risk losing efficiencies gained from their empirical knowledge. But the former provided a tacit understanding of design and architecture that traditional practice does not offer. As a result of investing almost all our nights, weekends, and sanity into this project, the design intent and crucial details were able to be maintained throughout construction and we (me plus the owners of the salon) possess a proud sense of ownership of the final product.