The Homewood Barbershop

The Homewood Barbershop has operated on 18th Street South in Homewood for more than sixty years, passed down through the same family across several generations rather than changing hands to outside owners. That kind of tenure is rare for any small business, let alone a barbershop competing against newer, more design-forward shops that have opened around it over the decades, and it has made the shop something of a fixture for longtime Homewood residents who grew up getting haircuts in the same chairs their fathers used.

Current owner Katie Mumalo has kept the shop’s family-run character intact while broadening what the barbershop actually offers. Rather than sticking strictly to traditional men’s cuts, the shop now serves a wider range of clients, including women and children, and offers a mix of classic styles, military-style cuts, and more modern trend-driven looks side by side on the same service menu. That range reflects a shop adapting to a changing neighborhood rather than freezing itself as a relic of an earlier era.

Among the more distinctive services on the shop’s list are creative color options aimed specifically at younger clients, including what the shop describes as fairy hair and organic, temporary vibrant color treatments, services that would have been unimaginable in a barbershop of this vintage a generation ago. Alongside those newer offerings, the shop still runs longer layered cuts and blunt cuts for clients who want a more tailored look than a standard barbershop trim, evidence of a business trying to serve an entire family’s hair needs in one visit rather than positioning itself narrowly as a men’s-only shop.

The shop keeps a six-day schedule, open Monday through Saturday with hours generally running from early morning into the late afternoon on weekdays and a shorter Saturday window. That early start, opening before most retail businesses in the neighborhood, caters to clients getting a cut in before work, a scheduling choice that has likely stayed consistent across the shop’s many decades in business even as ownership passed down through the family.

Sitting on 18th Street South, one of the core commercial corridors running through Homewood’s downtown, the barbershop occupies a spot in a stretch of the city that has changed considerably around it over sixty-plus years, as newer restaurants, boutiques, and salons have opened along the same blocks. The shop’s persistence through that changeover, still family owned and still cutting hair in the same general location, has turned it into a kind of anchor point for the neighborhood, a business residents can point to as having outlasted most of what has opened and closed around it.

For a barbershop with as much institutional history as this one carries, the willingness to add newer services like creative color for kids alongside decades-old standards like a classic military cut suggests a business more interested in staying useful to the neighborhood than in preserving a fixed identity. That balance, between honoring sixty years of family ownership and keeping the service menu current, has kept The Homewood Barbershop relevant to a client base that now spans several generations of the same Homewood families.

Appointments can be booked online through the shop’s own scheduling system, though walk-ins remain part of how a traditional barbershop like this one operates day to day, particularly for regulars who have been getting cuts from the same shop for years and know which mornings tend to be quieter. The shop maintains an active presence on social media, sharing before-and-after photos of both classic cuts and the newer color services aimed at younger clients, a way of showing off the range of work happening in a barbershop that could easily be mistaken, from the outside, for a place that only does one kind of haircut. For longtime Homewood residents, the shop’s continued presence on 18th Street South offers a small, steady point of continuity in a part of the city that has otherwise changed considerably over the six decades the barbershop has been open.