Hairstylist Alicia Elliott just can't stay away from Noe Valley. "We missed it here. Besides, those Wisconsin winters are brutal."
Some Noe Valley residents may remember Elliott from her days as the owner of Mop, a salon on 24th Street that is now operated by Bella Neimerovsky.
"I built Mop from the ground up, and ran it for three years. But then I got married, got pregnant, and wanted to move back home to Madison."
One winter and a baby girl later, Elliott and her husband, Kyle Elliott, decided they'd had enough of the Wisconsin weather and headed back to San Francisco.
"People are so friendly here, and they really remember you," she says, recalling a recent stroll down 24th Street with an out-of-town friend. "I was saying 'hi' to all the people I knew, and my friend turned to me and said, 'It's like walking around with a rock star.'"
After settling into her new home on 24th Street between Diamond and Douglass, Elliott started cutting hair for a few of her old clients. It wasn't long, however, before that became a problem. "All my stuff for hair was taking over the house!"
Not long after, during a casual conversation over the back fence with neighbors Ana Maria and Arturo Peņa, Elliott landed the perfect place to open a salon. "[The Peņas] own their building, just around the corner from our house, and it had unused storefront space. They said they'd been thinking about opening the space up for retail."
The two couples struck a deal, and Elliott and her husband, a commercial architect, got to work on creating Bamboo. The salon opened on Feb. 14 [2003] in the storefront next door to Edward Jones Investments, on Diamond near 24th Street.
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