I came to Blowouts & Company for the same reason I go to most salons: my hair problem and how to fix it. The salon had only recently opened in Deep Ellum, but as I sat down at the stylist’s table, my eyes kept wandering around the salon, a riot of art and color, as if someone’s entire personality had exploded onto the walls.
That someone would be co-owner Preston Pannek, who renovated the space with his wife, Adrienne, his partner in art crime, under the name House of Pannek. The duo left their hypnotic swirls and pop culture mashups along warehouses, bridges and brick walls, but Blowouts & Company is a different endeavor entirely.
Head stylist Aminah Johnson ran her hands through my frizzy hair, considering which tinctures to try, while I discreetly craned my neck to get a better look at the mural behind me. Another House of Pannek creation features the face of a young woman (Pannek’s cousin Tawni, who looks a lot like Lana Del Rey) with long waves of dark hair that are almost sculptural in their perfection, a level of detail rarely seen in spray art.
“How long have you been painting?” I asked 42-year-old Pannek as he sat next to me at the styling station.
He laughed. “Ever since I had hair,” he said, running his hand over his bald head.
Pannek is not the guy I would have expected to run a beauty salon, although Blowouts & Company is his second. Once a street kid, now a culture disrupter, he has become a folk hero of Deep Ellum through the murals he and Adrienne have painted in the entertainment district since 2017. A riff on Back to the futureBart Simpson holds a boombox above his head, a la John Cusack in Say something: I had passed by these Easter eggs while walking by the low-slung warehouses and wondered who had put them there. I never knew that the answer was the owner of The Lash Loft on the other end of Deep Ellum, where women like me went to perk up their eyes with a touch of Hollywood glamour.
Pannek opened The Lash Loft in 2014 with his then-girlfriend in a red brick building on the corner of Commerce and Canton. Their relationship didn’t last long, but business boomed. When the shop next door opened not long ago, Pannek jumped at the chance to expand his services, creating something of a mini beauty empire in the land of night owls and shot specials. It’s a great location: far enough from the center of the madness to have parking, but close enough to capitalize on the party. mood. Next he wants to open a nail salon.
Given the number of fashion-conscious Gen Z and Millennial women in the area, it’s a little surprising that there aren’t more beauty salons in the neighborhood. Blowouts & Company offers haircuts as well as the sleek, professional styling its name suggests. A blowout, in case you didn’t know, is a girly 21st-century luxury whose popularity might be best exemplified by Drybar, the California-based franchise whose cheery yellow and gray awnings protrude from Dallas-area malls.
I spent more money at Drybar than I care to admit, but the place can feel a bit like a Sex and the City Hangover, with romantic comedies on the flat screens and boozy brunch branding (a popular blowout style is the “cosmo-tai”), the long corridor of round brushes and thumping blowdryers becomes so hectic it can feel like 45 minutes on a beauty conveyor belt.
There’s a different vibe at Blowouts & Company. The two-story loft is grand but intimate. As Johnson soaped my hair in a sink, I stared at the pinks, blues, and oranges of a pane of glass above me, so much more interesting than the white industrial squares I’d stared at in other salons. This was feminine grooming with a Deep Ellum soul.
Deep Ellum is the place that saved Pannek, and that’s why he’s stayed here for so long. He grew up in Lake Highlands in the ’90s, a long-haired skater punk in JNCO jeans. He dropped out of school at 17 and began his lost years. “I did every drug imaginable,” he told me. He was homeless at times. For nearly a decade, he didn’t have a car or ID.
“Everything changed when I moved to Deep Ellum,” he told me. He was 29 and enchanted by the techno wonderlands of the Lizard Lounge and The Nines. That was in 2011, and he befriended the clubs’ owners and regulars and began to foster the creative spirit that had always been there.
A spray painting workshop at Deep Ellum Art Co. in 2017 led to his mural on the side of the company’s building on Commerce Street. “The Godfathers of Deep Ellum” was inspired by the poster for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs – a group of crooks in fancy black suits – under the names of downtown legends such as the late muralist Frank Campagna and the former owner of the now-closed Lizard Lounge Don Nedler.
In 2016, Pannek started dating his now wife Adrienne, and a year later, House of Pannek was born. The duo made a name for themselves with “10 Free Murals,” a guerrilla art series that mixes childhood nostalgia with video games and movie references. There’s Donald Duck in Clockwork Orangeand the Mario Bros. characters in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Pannek shrugs when I ask how many murals he’s painted since then. “More than 100?” he estimates. One made headlines last year when he spray-painted Mavs superstar Luka Doncic with a sign that said “Please send help.” Team owner Mark Cuban didn’t find it funny (“It’s disrespectful,” he emailed Pannek) and after a call from Doncic’s representative, Pannek painted over the mural, though he still calls himself a winner.
“What happened then?” he asks. “Kyrie came to town.”
He tells me all this while Johnson patiently blow-dries my hair into soft waves and sprays it with a can of R+Co. I never thought about the overlap between hairspray and spray paint, two tools of transformation. Maybe Pannek Is the person you’d expect to own a beauty salon. He understands that ultimately it’s art, whether the canvas is made of cement or skin, a bridge or blonde locks.
