As as I step through the door of David Mallett’s by-appointment-only salon, I am greeted a six foot ex-model/receptionist of extraordinary beauty. It’s a bit of a shock but, after I’ve been there for half and hour, I start to figure she can’t help it. After all, everything else in the salon is beautiful.

David Mallett has been cutting hair since he was 16. “I love my work,” he tells me. “Whenever I go on holiday, I get itchy fingers.” He moved to this high-ceilinged Haussmannian townhouse in order to create an “anti-salon” after his international celebrity clients decided they all preferred having their hair cut at his apartment rather then his workplace.

And the salon is like a very tasteful apartment: all calm, mushroom-colored walls with 19th century moldings picked out in cream. Each hairdressing station is a little antique table in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror which reflects the light from the tall windows. Just to take the conventional salon-busting a little further, there’s also Babette, a nine-foot tall stuffed ostrich standing imperiously in the middle of the room, occasionally losing her dignity when her tail-feathers are impishly ruffled by a blast from David’s hairdryer.

14 Rue Notre-Dame des Victoires, 75002, 
01 40 20 00 23

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