Nowadays, it’s all about the mix.
A loft is an office until 5 pm, and then a nightclub until 7
am. An art museum turns into a sweaty dance club on Saturday
nights; a coffee shop specializes in watercolor prints and homemade
marshmallows.
Maybe most fittingly for Park Slope is Frajean Salon: a brownstone
where you can find a glam handbag, a shot of calm-inducing aromatherapy,
European massage or a little advice on how to heal the roots
of a perm-fried ’do.
Frajean was established last April by Fran Pionegro, Jean Sopinko
and Stephen Lewis, who wanted to create a salon for friends and
by friends – a space that has everything you could want, including
good listeners.
"I love doing hair, but its not really about hair,"
said Lewis, the salon’s head stylist. "The most important
thing is meeting all the needs of every client. "
"All" and "every" are key to the ethos of
Frajean, a fusion of the owner’s first names, Jean and Fran.
The unisex, full-service salon offers haircuts, waxing, manicures
and pedicures, facials and starting this spring, customized fruit
acid exfoliation and aromatherapy massage on their spacious,
outdoor stone patio sporting hand-carved wooden furniture and
a hushed, secret-garden intimacy.
Sopinko visited salons around the city before returning to her
native Park Slope to open Frajean. Haircutting, styling and colorings
are the salon’s bread and butter, and it offers scalp treatments,
including an all-herbal wash; extensions; Japanese straightening;
and coddling for all kinds of curly and ethnic hair – unique
for a salon in Park Slope.
Alas, I was too wimpy for a new ’do, and it was far too cold
for a garden treatment when I visited Frajean on a recent, windy
Friday.
But Sopinko and company still gave me something new: a salon
welcome that didn’t include a mini-lecture from a prettier-than-thou
who wanted to see my eyes "brightened up."
Instead, stylists asked me what my non-English name meant and
noticed the totally hot (I like to think) modified-with-spikes-beehive
I’ve been sporting lately.
The restored brownstone’s blonde wood walls, floor and ceiling
glowed. Lewis and Sopinko, the salon’s owner, chatted with a
customer about a recent triumph over a bad perm.
The magic hour
After this casual chat, I was offered tea and led down a short
set of stairs into the salon’s cavern-like spa treatment area,
where I was to ready myself for 60 minutes of full-body Swedish
massage.
After the usual "everything but the undies off" instruction,
I was left alone in the soft anterior of the salon’s basement.
"Don’t rush," Alexandra Swirskaya, the salon’s massage
therapist told me as she set a pile of plush towels at the foot
of the bed and turned on an instrumental recording.
With its brick walls and ceiling cloaked in soft, gold and cream-colored
linens, the massage area felt like the womb of the avenue, a
plush down-under where ceilings are low and the only reminder
of the outside world is a faintly humming radiator.
Swirskaya combines deep-tissue muscle massage with gentler Swedish
techniques to work out the stress-knots that she calls "epidemic"
among her customers.
"I feel the tensions and use a spiritual touch to work into
them," she said, explaining that throughout her youth in
the Ukraine she learned about the "magical things"
that underwrite her mode of bodywork.
And magic it was. Like one of the storefront psychics farther
north on Seventh Avenue, she got to the source of my pain with
one quick question – "You work a lot on the computer?"
– and went to town on the desk-damaged regions of my back.
After roughly two minutes of almond-scented massage, my mind
was clean of all lingering nine to five concerns, and my knotted
muscles – finito.
I was willing to forgive anything (even the instrumental recording
playing – a rendition of what could’ve been the "Aladdin"
soundtrack) by the time Swirskaya rubbed out my last gnarl and
turned on a low light, again reminding me to take my time dismounting
the table and re-dressing.
After a few minutes of silence in the jasmine-scented quiet,
I willed myself into rising out of the womb and back up to street-level,
where the mood had moved into evening, and it felt even more
like a living room-salon mix-up.
Here, the wood walls emanated warmth, Lewis discussed past bad
hair-days with a new customer and Sopinko offered me a coffee
on a small silver tray.
She explained that Frajean is a first for her; when Sopinko’s
not at the salon, she runs an air conditioner business.
"A lot of our best [air conditioning biz] customers were
salons that I loved to visit," she said. "I’m always
looking of new things to invest in, so why not invest in something
you love?"
See the Brooklyn
Spa Directory for more information.
