Looking good is harder than it seems. I don’t always look good, that’s impossible. Having an easy-to-manage yet hard-to-copy haircut helps me quite a bit. It makes me look good to myself, and that is all that really matters. The people at Embellish Multispace Salon are interested in what helps you look good to you, too.



Thane Davis is a major dude. He told me a story of his childhood in Tacoma, about his white pony and how he rode it home from the Humane Society on 56th Street. He gets his hair cut at Embellish because he knows what’s good for him — his wife Patricia Lecy-Davis owns the joint. Davis no longer rides the white pony, but he is planning to open a juice bar on the ground floor of the building he and his wife recently purchased in the heart of downtown next to the YMCA.



Upstairs, with an entrance on Court D, Lecy-Davis runs Embellish Multispace Salon. This big purple building has one of the only remaining legal graffiti showcases painted on the north-facing wall, which seems to fly in the face of our cities “penalty for removal” policy. When I asked them how they did it, Lecy-Davis says, “Duh, I asked for a permit.”



Lecy-Davis wants to know you. She wants to know what your hair has to say about you, and how she can hear you through the dissonance. A few blocks from the salon she is setting up a living room at the Tacoma Farmers Market today and every Thursday this summer called the Local Living Lounge. She hopes to have a conversation with the city and offer isolated people and projects here a chance to connect to the whole. It is her second year as president of the Downtown Merchants Group, established to connect downtown Tacoma’s small businesses in a way that the Chamber Of Commerce could not.



When they aren’t attending local art shows or building their respective businesses, you can probably find Trish and Thane hard at work molding the middle floor of their building into a home. As far as I am concerned, this couple is living the New American Dream, these two have a flight of stairs as a commute and are within walking distance of every restaurant in new Tacoma. Their relationships are proof; Trish and Thane’s lives are a testament to a new way of urban thinking. Stop in Embellish if you want a relationship with your hairdresser (several to choose from) and look to hear stories from Thane at the Juice bar on Market Street within the year.



[Embellish Multispace Salon, 1121 Court D # A, Tacoma, 253.752.8144]