The Hourglass Reset: Two Ranked Salons and a Lake, All Before Lunch
Salon JW at No. 8 and Aveda–TCG Salon at No. 4 in our hair-salon rankings sit streets apart on Curry Ford Road. Pair the appointment with Hourglass Park and call it a morning.
3 minute read
Not every district story is about eating. The Hourglass District holds a quieter distinction: two of Orlando’s ranked hair salons stand a few hundred feet apart on Curry Ford Road, with a lake and a small county park at the end of the street for the hour after. It is the most civilised errand run in this part of the city, and our rankings back both halves of it.
Aveda – TCG Salon: No. 4, with a headspa
At 2413 Curry Ford Road, the salon listed in our rankings as Aveda – TCG Salon stands No. 4 among Orlando hair salons with a Net Score of 97.4 — the full table is in Best Hair Salons in Orlando, whose category winner feature profiles Privé Salon, linked here only as the category winner. Trading today as TCG Salon & Headspa, the salon has operated from this address since 2011 and built its identity around two things: Aveda hair care — cuts, colour, highlights, grey blending and Brazilian blowout among the listed services — and a Japanese-inspired headspa it promotes as Florida’s first Aveda headspa, a scalp-wellness treatment with evaluation, aromatherapy and massage elements that clients are advised to book extra time for. An Aveda facial menu has joined the offer. In a corridor of restaurants, TCG is the appointment that anchors a different kind of visit.
Salon JW: No. 8, and deliberately neighbourhood
At 2300 Curry Ford Road, Salon JW stands No. 8 in the same rankings with a Net Score of 97.2. Where TCG leans spa, Salon JW leans family: founded in 2004, by its own account, it invites clients to a place where they will feel like family, and its service list runs to the full neighbourhood repertoire — cuts for all ages, highlights, balayage in copper, caramel and red variations, and GK keratin treatments among them. Reviewers consistently praise the colour work and the welcome in equal measure, which for a salon at the west end of the corridor, steps from Foxtail Coffee, is exactly the reputation that keeps a book full.
The lake half of the reset
Finish the morning the district’s way. Hourglass Lake, the small lake east of the Bumby corner whose shape named the district, sits in a residential enclave platted in 1924 as the Hourglass Lake Park subdivision — oak canopy, bungalows, and streets that reward a slow walk. Hourglass Park at 1800 Carlton Drive is its public green: a small Orange County park suited to a bench and a coffee rather than an itinerary. Pair it with a box from Shaka Donuts a few blocks east and the reset is complete: appointment, lake, doughnuts, home before lunch. Find both salons and the park on the Orlando Top Spots Map. Small districts are supposed to be single-note. Between the brewery, the pizzeria and now two top-ten salons, the Hourglass District keeps declining to be.
Between them, the two salons also explain something about the corridor’s economy. The City of Orlando’s own description of Curry Ford West points to exactly this mix — bakeries, coffee shops, yoga studios and a variety of hair and nail salons — as the district’s everyday infrastructure, the services that make it a place residents use weekly rather than a strip visitors pass through. The salons are not decoration on the food scene; they are part of the load-bearing structure, drawing a steady, local, appointment-based footfall that the restaurants and the brewery then share.
Booking patterns differ in a way that suits different temperaments. TCG’s headspa is an appointment to plan around — the salon itself advises allowing extra time for the treatment’s unhurried sequence of scalp evaluation, aromatherapy and massage — while Salon JW’s neighbourhood model has long made room for walk-in trade alongside its booked colour work. Either way, mornings and Saturdays are the contested slots on Curry Ford Road, as they are in every good salon in the city; book the appointment first, then build the lake and doughnuts around it, rather than the other way round.
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