Artisan Hair Cutters

I lived in St Albans as a kid, and came to Artisan as a «hair model» when I was in school. (Trainees get to practice on you — supervised — and you get a really cheap haircut. Great for if you’re on a budget.) When I moved back to St Albans I found that hair models were not as popular as they once were, and as cuts at Artisan were more expensive than I was hoping, I tried a few different salons. After several unsatisfactory cuts I bit the bullet and came back here, and I’m oh so glad that I did. The quality of the haircuts I get here surpasses anything I’ve had in either St Albans or London.
Staff are polite, friendly, accommodating and unintimidating. They’re happy to either take direction if you know what you want, or give it if you don’t know. The service is thoroughly professional and they do whatever they can to make things easy (for example, I get a text message with the time and date of my appointment the day before, just in case I forget).
In addition, on the rare occasion that something gets mixed up, they go out of their way to fix it for you. For example, when I started coming here again (in 2011, I think) I used one of the junior stylists as her prices were cheaper. I had a few appointments with her, and then one day I arrived at the salon and found that she’d left to work elsewhere, and the only person available to do my hair was Sam, a senior stylist. They’d left me a voicemail message to tell me, but I hadn’t checked my voicemail. Despite it being entirely my fault for not checking my messages, Sam cut my hair at the lower price (that I’d been expecting to pay) rather than his normal higher rate.
(I have now transferred my allegiance to Sam, and even though I really shouldn’t afford him, I’ve never been happier with a stylist.)
It IS pricey here, but the old adage that you get what you pay for certainly rings true in this case. That said, if you’re on a budget, their junior stylists do good work, and it’s possible that they still take models for trainees. (I’ve never bothered to ask — once I had Sam doing my hair I didn’t want anyone else, ever!)
I would happily recommend Artisan to any of my friends. Between my school days and now, I’ve probably been here fifty or sixty times, with perhaps twenty different stylists, and I’ve never been disappointed with the service.