Photography by Carmen Troesser
Helen Petty vaults herself backward onto her new kitchen counter and, perched among floating wooden shelves and potted plants, returns to the word “organic.” That’s the right adjective, she thinks, to describe the aesthetic thread running through her rehabbed home in South City and the Chop Shop hair salon collective that she founded in The Grove, and even the hairstyles that are her signature. The vibe is natural, not contrived.
A native of California, Petty arrived in St. Louis in the mid-1990s as a seventh-grader. She went to culinary school and toughed it out as a pastry chef for a while but decided that cutting hair would offer better hours and pay. She helped steer the renovation of the building on Manchester that’s now Chop Shop. The business grew into such a beehive of activity that she opened a second location, Chop Shop East, practically next door. In June 2020, Petty and her then-fiancé closed on a 1937 gingerbread-style house in the Southwest Garden neighborhood and turned it into a bright, airy, contemporary space.
These giant wood beams over my head—where did you get them? At an architectural timber salvage near the river. I don’t know what building [the salvager] pulled them out of, but he told us this is 100-year-old longleaf pine. When I get up there and wash it, it reactivates it, and it smells like fresh pine. Sometimes when people redo old houses, they take all of the love and charm out of them and put in a lot of drywall. I get why people do that—because it’s cheaper—but I wanted something with organic elements.
How do you find and store your ideas? You see something at someone’s house, or in a magazine, or just walking around St. Louis—it’s so rich with history. I found this [kitchen] island on Facebook Marketplace; it had been a university lab cabinet in Ohio. I got an account on Pinterest when we were doing the house, but I am a total Luddite and wildly inefficient. I take screenshots for people instead of linking.
How was the transition from working as a pastry chef to cutting hair? Baking and doing hair are more similar than people think: They’re physical jobs you do with your hands. You have to have the right ratios, but it also has to look beautiful. You have to know how to get the color tone you want. There’s a technical and artistic aspect to both.
In the salon, do you consider yourself an artist? I’ve always been uncomfortable with that term. You’re not inflicting a hairstyle on someone. A lot of the job is knowing how to listen to somebody and interpret what they’re saying and do it a little better. I think the people skills of doing hair are more important than your technical skills. You have to learn how to listen and respect and engage.
Where else does your creativity come out? Last year, we made a sukkah [a temporary dwelling built to mark the Jewish festival of Sukkot]. I cook all the time; I bake all the time. I’m a huge dabbler. For a while, I was knitting. I’ve been learning Hebrew for years. I have a huge Hanukkah celebration every year. There’s an element of caretaking in all that. You want people to feel comfortable in a space, people to be fed and cared for.
