MAVA Design Turns a Column-Riddled Shell into a Serene Hair Extension Salon in Kyiv

When a beauty salon moves into an empty shell space peppered with structural columns, most designers would view those columns as obstacles to route around. MAVA design did the opposite. At The Extension Atelier, a 110 square metre hair extension studio inside the Unit Home residential complex in Kyiv, the columns become the organizing logic of the entire plan, anchoring zones rather than interrupting them. The result is an interior that feels calm, precise, and surprisingly spacious for its footprint.

Unit Home sits within UNIT.City Innovation Park, a redevelopment of an abandoned motorcycle factory campus. That industrial lineage is legible here: exposed concrete ceilings, raw column surfaces, and a general frankness about structure. MAVA design leans into this honesty, layering dark terrazzo stone, pale timber, white-painted brick, and soft curtain tracks against the existing bones. It is a salon that feels more like a gallery apartment than a retail fit-out, which is precisely the point for a business whose product is personal and intimate.

Facade and Threshold

Street-level glazing framed in black metal dissolves the boundary between the planted entry plaza and the interior. At dusk, the salon glows outward: the dark terrazzo counter, the pleated pendant lamp, and the warm timber millwork all become a kind of shop window without needing a traditional display. There is no signage shouting for attention. The facade does the selling quietly, drawing the eye toward the coral flowers on the reception desk and the soft curtain lines beyond.

The corner glazing condition is particularly well handled. Where two glass walls meet, the interior is visible from multiple vantage points along the sidewalk, yet the depth of the plan ensures that private treatment areas remain obscured. It is a smart gradient from public to intimate, achieved almost entirely through transparency and distance rather than opaque barriers.

The Column Strategy

A cluster of concrete columns occupies the center of the room. Rather than concealing them inside partition walls, MAVA design leaves them exposed and uses them as spatial markers. The reception counter wraps around one column. A floating display cabinet hovers between two others. A curtain track curves gently past a third. Each column gets a role, and together they subdivide the open plan into legible zones without a single permanent wall between them.

The decision pays off in flexibility. Curtains on curved metal tracks can be drawn to enclose the styling stations or pulled back to open the entire floor. The salon can feel private and cocoon-like for a single client or generous and airy during a busy afternoon. It is a soft partition system that acknowledges how a beauty business actually operates: never the same twice.

Material Honesty: Stone, Brick, Timber

The material palette is tight. Dark terrazzo stone, with its visible aggregate and mitred corner joints, handles the heavy lifting at the reception counter, basins, and shelving. White-painted brick lines the styling wall, lending domestic warmth. Timber appears as cantilevered vanities and millwork, always paired with matte black hardware. Concrete stays raw where it was found.

What holds the palette together is consistency of finish quality. The terrazzo joints are clean; the timber grain is selected for uniformity; the brick paint is flat and even. Nothing is precious, but everything is considered. The acrylic display cases on the terrazzo counter deserve a mention: they elevate product presentation without cluttering the stone surface, a small detail that separates this from a standard salon fit-out.

Reception and Display

The reception counter is the spatial anchor of the plan. Its dark speckled stone mass grounds the otherwise pale and airy interior, creating a focal point visible from the street. A ribbed pendant light hangs above, casting textured shadows that soften the stone's weight. Behind, a translucent glass partition with a fine grid pattern filters light from the styling area, ensuring the reception remains visually distinct from the working zones.

Red protea flowers and dried stems recur as styling elements on the counter and nearby shelves. They are a deliberate choice: sculptural, long-lasting, and visually punchy against the dark stone. The vases, a mix of white ceramic and clear glass, reinforce the restrained color story. This is a salon that understands how to curate a mood without overdoing it.

Styling Stations and Natural Light

Hair extension work demands good light, and MAVA design delivers. The styling stations sit against the white brick wall, where sunlight enters through glazing and bounces off the pale surfaces. Framed mirrors are wall-mounted rather than freestanding, keeping the floor clear and the sightlines long. Wall-mounted timber cabinets above the stations hold tools within reach but out of view, maintaining the gallery-like calm.

At the window-side station, potted plants sit on a timber ledge, and the mirror catches both the client and the tree canopy outside. It is a small composition that collapses interior and exterior into one frame, making a 110 square metre space feel far more expansive. The exposed ceiling joists overhead are left unpainted, preserving the industrial register that runs through the whole project.

Waiting and Lounge Details

The waiting area is deliberately domestic. A grey upholstered sofa faces a floor-to-ceiling window with a pine tree outside. A brushed stainless steel side table, with a cantilevered top just wide enough for a book or phone, sits beside it. The furniture is low and the lighting is soft. Clients are meant to decompress here before and after their appointment, and the space reads more as a living room than a commercial lobby.

The choice of brushed metal for the pedestal table is deliberate. It picks up the matte quality of the curtain tracks and the black faucet hardware without introducing a new material family. Every piece of furniture feels like it belongs to the same system, which is a hallmark of disciplined interior design.

Product as Display Object

One image makes the salon's purpose beautifully literal: three bundles of hair extensions hang from a metal rail against a pale curtain, displayed as though they were textile samples in a design showroom. It is a confident gesture. Most salons hide product in back rooms or stock shelves. Here, the product is presented as craft, which reframes the entire business proposition.

This attitude extends to the wash station, where a cantilevered timber vanity with a dark stone basin overlooks winter trees through full-height glazing. Even the most functional moment in the salon, washing hair, is staged with care. The gridded translucent glass partition nearby ensures privacy from the reception zone without closing the space off entirely.

Plans and Drawings

The axonometric drawing reveals the full strategy at a glance: curved curtain tracks snake between columns, defining soft zones within the open plan. The reception counter occupies the center-front, with styling stations along one wall and service areas tucked to the side. The floor plans show how the staircase and service core are pushed to the left edge, freeing the main volume for the client-facing program. A circular feature, likely the curtain track loop around the central column cluster, reads clearly in plan as the project's organizing device.

What the drawings confirm is how little permanent construction was added. The existing shell provided the floor, ceiling, and columns. MAVA design inserted furniture, curtains, and one painted brick wall. The economy of means is striking. Nearly everything is removable or reconfigurable, which gives the salon a long operational lifespan even as the business evolves.

Why This Project Matters

The Extension Atelier matters because it demonstrates that small commercial interiors can be architecturally serious without being self-important. MAVA design took a constrained brief, a tight budget implied by the minimal interventions, and a structurally awkward shell, and produced a space with a clear spatial idea. The columns-as-organizers concept is not radical, but it is executed with enough discipline to feel inevitable rather than imposed.

More broadly, the project signals something about Kyiv's design culture in 2025. That a hair extension salon in a repurposed factory campus is being designed with this level of rigor speaks to a client base that values craft and atmosphere, and a design community that treats every project as an opportunity to build a position. The Extension Atelier does not try to be monumental. It simply works, looks right, and trusts its materials. That is more than enough.

The Extension Atelier by MAVA design, Kyiv, Ukraine. 110 m², completed 2025. Photography by Mykhailo Lukashuk.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.