Advertisement

arts entertainmentLifestyle

How a muralist and former street kid is building a Deep Ellum beauty empire

Preston Pannek has beefed with Mark Cuban and spray-painted more than 100 murals. For his next trick? Blowouts!

I came to Blowouts & Company for the same reason I enter most salons: The problem of my hair and how to fix it. The space had recently opened in Deep Ellum, but as I sat down at the stylist’s station, my eyes kept wandering across the salon, a riot of art and color, as though someone’s entire personality had exploded on 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 have left their hypnotic swirls and pop-culture mash-ups along warehouses, bridges and brick walls, but Blowouts & Company is another endeavor entirely.

The lead stylist, Aminah Johnson, ran her hands through the frizz bomb of my hair, contemplating what potions to try, as I subtly craned my neck for a better view of the mural behind me. Another House of Pannek creation, it shows a young woman’s face (Pannek’s cousin Tawni, looking very Lana Del Rey) with long waves of dark hair nearly sculptural in their perfection, the kind of detail rarely seen in spray-painted art.

Advertisement

“How long have you been painting?” I asked Pannek, 42, as he lounged at the styling station beside me.

News Roundups

Catch up on the day's news you need to know.

Or with:

He laughed. “Since I had hair,” he said, running a hand over his bald dome.

Pannek is not the guy I expected to be running a beauty salon, though Blowouts & Company is his second. Former street kid, current culture-jammer, he’s become a Deep Ellum folk hero for the murals he and Adrienne painted across the entertainment district starting in 2017. A riff on Back to the Future, Bart Simpson holding a boombox over his head, a la John Cusack in Say Anything: I’d passed those Easter eggs as I wound along the low-slung warehouses, wondering who put them there. I never knew the answer was the owner of The Lash Loft on the far edge of Deep Ellum, where women like me went to jazz up their eyes with a dash of Hollywood glamour.

Blowouts & Company's Preston Pannek, right, with co-owner Rickie Tapia at the newly opened...
Blowouts & Company's Preston Pannek, right, with co-owner Rickie Tapia at the newly opened salon in Deep Ellum.(Chitose Suzuki / Staff Photographer)

Pannek opened The Lash Loft in a red-brick building at Commerce and Canton in 2014 with his then-girlfriend. Their relationship didn’t last, but the business boomed. When the space next door opened not long ago, Pannek leapt at the chance to expand his services, creating something of a mini-beauty empire in the land of night crawlers and shot specials. It’s a plum location: Far enough from the center of the craziness to have parking but close enough to feed on the party vibe. He’s hoping to build a nail salon next.

It’s a bit surprising the neighborhood doesn’t have more beauty depots, given the number of fashion-conscious Gen Z and millennial women in the area. Blowouts & Company offers cuts as well as the sleek professional styling suggested by its name. A blowout, in case you didn’t know, is a girlish indulgence of the 21st century whose popularity might best be illustrated by Drybar, the California-based franchise whose chirpy yellow and gray marquees peek out from strip malls across the Dallas area.

Advertisement

I’ve dropped more cash at Drybar than I care to admit, but the place can feel a bit like a Sex and the City hangover, with rom-coms on the flat screens and the boozy-brunch branding (a popular blowout style is the “Cosmo-Tai”). The long corridor of round brushes and heaving blow dryers gets so hectic it can feel like 45 minutes on a beauty conveyor belt.

Blowouts & Company is a different vibe. The two-story loft space is grand but intimate. As Johnson lathered my hair in a rinsing basin, I stared at the pink and blue and orange of a glass panel above me, so much more interesting than the white industrial squares I’ve stared at in other salons. This was feminine upkeep with a Deep Ellum soul.

Hairstylist Aminah Johnson (far right) washes Dallas resident Sam Rodriguez’s hair at...
Hairstylist Aminah Johnson (far right) washes Dallas resident Sam Rodriguez’s hair at Blowouts & Company on Aug. 13, 2024, in the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas. House of Pannek artwork can be seen around the sink.(Chitose Suzuki / Staff Photographer)
Advertisement

Deep Ellum is the place that saved Pannek, which is why he’s stuck around 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, kickstarting his lost years. “I did every drug you can think of,” he told me. He was in and out of homelessness. He didn’t have a car or an ID of any kind for nearly a decade.

“Everything changed when I moved to Deep Ellum,” he told me. He was 29, entranced by the techno wonderlands of the Lizard Lounge and The Nines. This was 2011, and he got tight with the clubs’ owners and scene regulars and began nurturing the creative spirit that had been there all along.

A spray-painting workshop at Deep Ellum Art Co. in 2017 led to his mural on the side of that company’s Commerce Street building. “The Godfathers of Deep Ellum” was inspired by the poster for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs — a group of hustlers in sharp black suits — underneath the names of downtown legends like muralist Frank Campagna and former owner of the now-closed Lizard Lounge Don Nedler.

Related Stories
View More

Back in 2016, Pannek had started dating his now-wife Adrienne, and a year later, House of Pannek was born. The duo made their name with “10 Free Murals,” a guerrilla-art series that mixes childhood nostalgia with video games and movie references. There’s Donald Duck in A Clockwork Orange, and 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 guesstimates. One made headlines last year when he spray-painted Mavs superstar Luka Doncic holding a sign that read “Please send help.” Team owner Mark Cuban didn’t find that funny (“It’s disrespectful,” he emailed Pannek) and after a call from Doncic’s representative, Pannek painted over the mural, though he still claims victory.

“What happened next?” he says. “Kyrie came to town.”

He tells me all this as Johnson patiently blow-dries my hair into soft waves, spritzing them with a can of R+Co. I never thought about the overlap between hair spray and spray paint, two tools of transformation. Maybe Pannek is the person you’d expect to own a beauty salon. He understands that whether the canvas is cement or skin, bridge or blond locks, it’s all art after all.

Advertisement
Hairstylist Aminah Johnson, right, washes Dallas resident Sam Rodriguez’s hair at Blowouts &...
Hairstylist Aminah Johnson, right, washes Dallas resident Sam Rodriguez’s hair at Blowouts & Company on Aug. 13, 2024, in Deep Ellum. All the women depicted in the salon's murals are cousins of co-owner Preston Pannek.(Chitose Suzuki / Staff Photographer)

CORRECTION, 11:02 p.m., Aug. 17, 2024: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described muralist Frank Campagna.