| FEBRUARY 1, 2011 -- It was exciting for Prestige Salon and Spa to be chosen for the Chamber of Commerce’s Business Development Award this year, said salon owner Bozena Przybylko.
“It was a surprise because I would expect something like that maybe after five years in business. I think it has something to do with what we’ve done with the building,” she said. “I’m very excited people like what we’ve done. We have gotten so many compliments.”
The salon opened in late 2009 in the first floor of the old Plymouth Grange Hall, at 694 Main St. Bozena and her husband Robert Przybylko, with their 8-year-old daughter Victoria, moved to town not long before that.
Bozena said she loves meeting and talking with her neighbors at work. She compared it to the movie “Steel Magnolias,” in which Dolly Parton plays the owner of a small beauty salon in her home.
Originally from the same neighborhood in Bialystok, Poland, since the 1990s the Przybylkos lived in various towns in Connecticut before settling in Plymouth. Bozena has been a hairdresser since she was 18 years old, and her mother was a hairdresser too. “Just like my daughter, I grew up in a hair salon,” she said.
She trained in Poland, and then worked at Adam Broderick Salon in Ridgefield, one of the biggest salons in the United States.
More recently, she worked at Gallery Salon in Farmington, as hair stylist for on-air talent at a local television news station.
Opening her own salon was a dream come true. She and her husband remodeled the Grange Hall interior to house the salon, a special bridal room, a manicure room, and a room for facials and massages. Right now Bozena works with two other stylists, plus an esthetician and a massage therapist.
She can also arrange with a friend who owns a limousine service in Bristol to chauffeur bridal parties or mothers and daughters having a spa day. “I started with no customers. Now it’s growing, and I’m very proud of it,” she said. “The customers are mostly from this area, and they bring their friends and family members. Some of my old customers found me again and they come here, so it’s doing well.”
Bozena said she has been back to visit Poland but most of her family moved away to Sweden and England during the Communist era. Bialystok is very different from when she and her husband grew up there. “There are lots of stores and malls. It’s more like here now. They have everything, because Poland is part of the European Union,” she said.
“Probably if it had been like that when I was growing up I would never have come to this country. There were no opportunities there at that time. When I went to school everybody learned Russian. I never went to school for English, I learned it from my customers here,” she continued.
Bozena said she really appreciated all the help the Plymouth chamber had given her in starting her own business. Being a chamber member helps you meet new people, she said, so she is looking forward to bringing some business-owning friends to the annual chamber dinner Wednesday.
For more information, call Prestige Salon and Spa at (860) 283-0250 or visit http://prestigesalon-spa.com.
The History Behind The Prestige
The building that houses Prestige Salon and Spa has been in town a long time. About 200 years in fact. For most of that time, it was the Plymouth Grange Hall.
“It goes back about to 1812 or 1815. The post office next door goes back to 1790,” said landlord James Calciano. “I have a picture of a horse and buggy in front of the post office. You can see a part of the porch of the grange building.” Calciano owns the Old Grange Hall, at 694 Main St., Plymouth center, plus the small post office and the carriage house in back of it. The building has gone through many changes and identities in two centuries. Calciano doesn’t know what its original purpose was, but he knows the back half was added on later. “It was part of a wagon factory that was up the street, where the general store is now,” he said. “Someone joined them together and it became the Grange Hall, somewhere probably around the 1850s or 1860s.”
The hall was in use by the grange agricultural club until the club sold it to Calciano in the early 1980s. He converted the upstairs into two apartments with maple floors, high arched metal “barrel” ceilings, and sleeping lofts. One of the apartments uses the Grange Hall’s old stage as a bedroom, he said. The downstairs was used as commercial space over the years, housing an antique shop; then a candle/incense shop, which held small musical gigs and open mic nights; a consignment shop; and a real estate office.
For a while it was an antique book shop, before Robert and Bozena Przybylko renovated it into the salon in 2009. “They did a great job and i did the outside. I repainted it and put in the asphalt driveway – all the things we had to do to make it a success,” Calciano said. The old grange hall was the focal point of Plymouth center, recalled Barbara Sekorski, who grew up in that section of town.
Back when she was Barbara Packer, she attended the Old Plymouth Center School, which was located by the green. She remembers going to a penny candy store by the old jailhouse in the neighborhood, and then to the Grange hall. “We would go upstairs by enclosed stairs on the side,” she said.
“You could walk to everything then. This was a big deal to come over here to the hall,” she said. “We did shows here on the stage in the late ‘40s. We’d have our rehearsals upstairs. They tell me that’s someone’s bedroom now.”
The shows helped raise money for the Plymouth Community Boys and Girls Club, which was the predecessor of the town’s parks and recreation department, she said.
“The lady that was instrumental in the Grange, as well as the Plymouth Community Boys and Girls Club, was Ethel Gibbon. She was a fixture in this town. She tried to get new blood for the Grange but it didn’t work,” Sekorski said.
The Plymouth Grange has since merged with the Whigville Grange in Burlington. Now a regular customer at the salon, Sekorski said, “whenever i come in here, i think to myself ‘oh if these walls could talk.’” |
