By Juliet O’Neill
There is no Gigi at Gigi’s now. There’s Chuck, Chuck Barhoum. The Gigi in Gigi Hair Design was the nickname of Gilberte Fortier, the woman who opened the salon on Dalhousie Street in 1950.
Chuck has a soft spot for the history and the several hair stylists who came before him at what is likely the oldest salon in the ByWard Market.
He speaks affectionately of the first two — Gigi and her successor Yvette Jolicoeur, now age 97, who owns the building that houses the salon. In Yvette’s day, before hair blowers, customers would come, take a number and get an estimate of when to return.
There were only so many hair dryers to sit under. Chuck kept two of them for sentimental reasons after he renovated in 2006 and has had them reupholstered twice, once in burgundy and now in black.
The retro dryers made by Paramount still work fine for customers who use curlers (along with his latest and greatest modern dryers and his hair blowers of course), which is good because nobody makes or repairs them anymore. His only renovation regret is not keeping the black-and-white tiled floors.
Originally the salon was nestled against a candy shop and the competition was a block down Dalhousie at Antoinette de Paris, where Bridgehead now stands. Antoinette really was from Paris, Chuck said in an interview.
There are more than two dozen hair salons in Lowertown now, many of them along Dalhousie. Chuck, always cheerful and chatty, is a colour specialist.
His customers range in age from 1 to 100, literally, and about 20 per cent of them are boys and men. He wanted to add “unisex” to the sign over the shop, but it was too long.
Chuck took over the salon in 1995, just a few years after immigrating to Ottawa from the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon. He was age 25, working as a hairdresser and wanting to get away from war. He brought over his fiancée Nadia, (now his wife) later, when she had finished university and he was settled. She works with him in the salon.
Every Friday he does “the golden girls,” four friends aged 70 through 85 who’ve been coming to get their hair done at Gigi’s together for about three decades.
Chuck jokes that he gets all his news from customers like them. They discuss politics and City Hall among other things. He has the TV on a news channel all day, so keeps up on international affairs – happily for his many customers from the nearby federal government Global Affairs building. He’s had appointment requests from some of them as far away as China and Brazil.
It’s uncanny how much detail he remembers about his clients, such as names, family members, birthdays and holiday destinations. He said one client returned after 16 years in Western Canada and he bowled her over by recognizing her voice on the phone before she said who she was.
Chuck said the cliché is true: some customers confide marital woes and other secrets. “I hear a lot of stories; I could write books,” he said. But he doesn’t; he’s discreet.
What’s changed the most during his time as a stylist so far? In the last decade, he said there’s been a surge of people who try colours or cuts on themselves based on advice from You Tube “and they come to their hairdresser to correct it.”
He teaches a lot of clients how to properly style and blow dry their hair because everybody who comes to his salon is a walking advertisement for him afterward.
Chuck is thoughtful about his prices, which are lower than many of his competitors though he keeps up with the latest styles, products, technology and salon decor. He jokes that he’s not a plastic surgeon. Fair pricing is a matter of pride, as is his business philosophy: “simple and efficient.”