Vancouver Magazine 'Cut, Colour And Style Job'

Designer Gideon Flitt, 27, decided that "Vancouver's hair salons looked like the inside of the toilets at the Four Seasons. They're very well decorated but have no muscle, no emotion." So this summer, he opened The Room at 3619 West 4th Avenue-a stripped-down, combination painter's studio and hair salon decorated not with the usual mirrors, laquer and arborite but Flitt's own large-scale oil paintings, and the occasional toaster sculpture. Monday to Wednesday, his "studio of creativity" is devoted to painting, as the British-born Flitt invites passersby to come inside to watch him play his cello or reproduce his impeccably staged photographs on canvas in painstaking, hyperrealist detail.

In The Room's first two months, he sold three of his imposing religious and sexual imagery-filled works for $3,000 each. (The Diane Farris Gallery requested his portfolio but, says Flitt, "I'd given it to my mum in London, 'cause she liked it so much.") For the rest of the week, he trades linseed oil for Barbasol and transforms The Room into a very halcyon sort of hair salon. All the painting paraphernalia is hidden away as Flitt cuts and styles hair-and waxes philosophical: "The people become the object of fascination, not the space." Pomo coifs: $35.