Where Beauty Lives: Inside Cure Nailhouse
A human space where design is ritual and architecture holds care.
In beauty, we obsess over products, shades, and innovation. But what if the next frontier isn’t what we put on, it’s the spaces we step into? As everything grows sleeker and more commercial, too many beauty rooms have designed out intimacy and lineage.
Cure Nailhouse offers a return to intention. Founded in Detroit by Cyndia Robinson and opened in July 2025, the studio treats beauty as architecture with rooms paced like ritual, built to preserve craft, culture, and community.
“In my culture, as a Black woman, nails have always been more than cosmetic. They are ritual, they are language, and they are a declaration of self.”
Cyndia Robinson, Founder of Cure Nailhouse
That language began in childhood, waking early for salon visits with her mother, co-creating through color and line. The practice became a template for how she defines beauty and care. “For me, Cure is about freedom,” she adds. “Freedom to express yourself without apology. Freedom to see nails not as something ‘ghetto’ or superficial, but as art. Freedom to step into a space built for us, by us, where culture and creativity are preserved.”
“Cure” is also literal: to preserve, protect, transform. That philosophy shapes both the artistry and the room—every texture, curve, and choice supporting a slower, restorative pace.
Bringing the vision to life required collaboration. Robinson partnered with architect Tadd Heidgerken of Et-Al Collaborative to set the structure and rhythm, scale, circulation, and sightlines that keep the experience calm and human. As the project evolved, Tiffany Thompson joined as partner and head of partnerships & design, refining the interiors with a residential eye.
My role was to tune how the space greets you and how it holds you. We designed a commercial space that behaves like a home.
Tiffany Thompson, Partner & Head of Partnerships
“Cynn and Tadd had already mapped the flow,” Thompson says. “My role was to tune how the space greets you and how it holds you.” She simplified the brand palette to two anchor tones, grounding the bar and soak room in a deep merlot. Hardware shifted to stainless steel, “neutral luxury,” she calls it, chosen for longevity and the way it plays with light. Curves soften edges throughout, signaling safety and ease. The effect is warm and exacting: a commercial studio designed to work like a home.
Cure’s build also folds in Detroit itself. An artist-in-residence program centers nail craft as fine art, while community resources like Motor City Match and ProsperUs helped move the vision from sketch to site. “I want people to feel like they’ve stepped into something intentional, layered, and alive with culture,” Robinson says. “I want Black women especially to feel seen, centered, and celebrated, and to know this was built with them in mind.”
Today, nails sit at the intersection of fashion, beauty, and art, on runways, editorial shoots, and red carpets, shaping an aesthetic as forcefully as hair and makeup. Robinson is clear about lineage and credit: the styles once dismissed as unprofessional or “too much” were pioneered by Black women and are now heralded as trendsetting. Cure names that history while creating room for what comes next.
Thompson sees the project as a statement on durability, of materials, and of community. “We designed a commercial space that behaves like a home,” she says. “It needs to welcome many people and endure.”
Cure argues that design is not decor, it’s care. A palette, a metal finish, the radius of a bench: these are choices about how a person is greeted, held, and seen. Beauty doesn’t only happen on the body; it happens in the rooms we build—and in the details shaped by attention.
“Most of all, I want people to feel inspired,” Robinson says. “To know they’re part of something that preserves, pushes, and redefines what nails, beauty, and art can be.”