i.
The house cut
120 minutes · pp. 06–11
The signature appointment. Wash, slow scissor cut, hand-finished blow-dry. Photographed for the next issue.
120 min$245
A 64-page quarterly published by Folio Studio — the editorial salon on Mountain Street that publishes every appointment it ships.
The cover figure for this Quarterly — the hand-finished cut, photographed across thirty-four working days in the Mountain Street room.
Five departments, eleven services, two case studies and one letter from the floor.
The hand-finished cut is a phrase the trade uses without much thought. At Folio Studio, the phrase is the appointment. Hand-cut. Hand-finished. Hand-styled with a single pair of scissors and a single brush. Two hours, the same scissors for ten years, no clippers in the room.
This is unfashionable. The Mountain Street salons run a hair every forty-five minutes, finished with three different irons by three different juniors, charging seventy-five dollars for the trouble. The price difference is what people see; the time difference is what they feel. Two hundred and forty-five dollars buys two hours of one cutter; seventy-five buys forty-five minutes of three people whose hands have not warmed up to the hair.
The Editor of this Quarterly does not have a marketing budget. The salon has been at this rhythm for nine issues. The thirteen-cuts-a-week ceiling has held since opening day in January 2021 and will be held until the cutter retires. There is no junior. There is no plan to add one.
That is the article. It is the same article most issues. Subscribers tell us the article is the entire reason they read. The salon is on Mountain Street, the diary opens the first Monday of each month for the next month — by phone or email, never by online booking.
The consultation — fifteen minutes, no scissors yet, the cutter's notebook open on the bench.
A four-minute wash in the Mountain Street basin — the only ritual that has not changed since opening.
Single-process applied by hand, never the brush. Two hours, root to ends, one cutter from start to finish.
Hand-cut with a single pair of scissors — the same scissors for ten years, sharpened on Foveaux Street.
One brush, one iron, the cutter's own hand. Twenty minutes from blow-dry to the door.
The Mountain Street footpath at five — the subject of the back cover for three issues running.
The signature appointment. Wash, slow scissor cut, hand-finished blow-dry. Photographed for the next issue.
Single-process or root-touch only. No foiling, no over-bleaching. We work with the colour the hair has.
The post-house-cut tidy. Two weeks after a house cut, in and out in forty-five minutes. Members only.
Consultation week. Three pages of notes; no scissors. The reader's first visit since 2019.
The grow-out is a case the salon takes once or twice a year — a reader who wants to leave the colour she has worn for nine years and go back to the colour she had at twenty-two.
This is not a haircut. It is a six-month relationship with the same cutter, twelve appointments, the same hour each fortnight. The photographs were made on a single camera and printed at Sydney Lab in Chippendale.
The Quarterly publishes one case study per issue. The reader chooses whether her name appears in the byline. This one did.
Six months in. The colour is the reader's own; the cut is shoulder, hand-finished, no styling beyond a single pass of the brush.
The Mountain Street footpath at five — the subject of the back cover for three issues running, photographed on the same Sigma DP-2 since 2021.
Suite 4, 88 Mountain Street
Chippendale NSW 2008
Wed · Thu · Fri · Sat
11:00 – 19:00
+61 2 9211 7702
diary@foliostudio.co