In a downtown Naperville location that’s difficult to find, Eric Sowa wants to expand his barber shop into the health and wellness realm, and members of the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission have endorsed his plan.
Commissioners unanimously recommended Wednesday that the Naperville City Council adopt a zoning variance to allow Sowa’s proposed health spa on the first floor in the downtown B4 zoning district.
Sara Kopinski, a member of the city’s planning services team, said health spas are allowed in B4 but restricted by code to the second floor or above. This is because these businesses “are not found to generate as much pedestrian activity or rely on passersby for customers,” she said, so they don’t help ensure downtown remains a vibrant area for people to walk and shop.
While Sowa’s shop — Barber Haus, at 232 S. Washington St. — is within the downtown core district, it has no Washington Street frontage and is only visible from the back of the property, next to an alley and the Chicago Avenue parking garage. To find it from Washington, customers must walk through a gap between storefronts to the back of a multitenant commercial building, accessed from a small courtyard.
“My location of my business is tucked away form the main strip. Even being there for three years, new clients are still having a struggle finding me,” Sowa said. “Many of those businesses back there need to operate as a destination location — people don’t stumble across us; they have to seek us out.”
The Downtown Naperville Alliance board submitted comments to the city, saying the “limited visibility” of the Barber Haus site “makes this a difficult location for traditional retail.” The group supported Sowa’s plan to expand his shop from suite 7 of the commercial building at 232 S. Washington into the adjacent suite 6 as well.
With his planned expansion, Sowa wants to create a health spa and wellness shop called Health Haus to complement Barber Haus and create what he described in his petition to the city as “a complete destination for grooming and wellness.”
Inside the proposed 1,100-square-foot Health Haus, Sowa would offer an IV drip center, a medspa, a chiropractor and specialty products including skin, hair and scalp care items, electrolyte drinks and cold-press juices.
“I am creating a one-stop-shop for our clients and emphasizing on wellness for males, instead of most major barber chains that want to promote alcohol,” Sowa wrote in his petition.
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If approved by the city council, Sowa could create Health Haus within a space currently occupied by a beauty training business, which is across the courtyard from an aerial yoga studio.
He said he envisions the brick patio near the parking garage as a “destination courtyard, and maybe a wellness court.”
“Staff agrees that establishing a health spa in suite six will complement the existing uses and support surrounding businesses by attracting additional traffic to the area,” Kopinski said.
Health Haus would not be the first health spa allowed on the first floor in the downtown as an exception to the second-floor-and-above rule. Planning and Zoning Commission Chairwoman Whitney Robbins said a handful of nail salons and similar businesses have been approved for the first floor over the years, with The Now massage spa built during the Old Nichols Library redevelopment as the most recent example.
Marie Wilson is a freelance reporter for the Naperville Sun.