When Tara Nalty opened her salon on South Broadway in 2019, a classic barbershop across the street caught her eye.

It was like a “museum,” Nalty said.

Over four years, she walked countless times past Sam Hill’s Barbershop — the oldest operating business in Englewood at 115 years old — looking through the window to see its taxidermy figures on the wall, old-school chairs with ashtrays still attached and a retro barbershop bench.

As her salon Arrow Beauty grew too big for its space, she considered asking the owner of Sam Hill’s if she could rent a few chairs. In actuality, Nalty wished to buy it all but feared it would be insulting to ask knowing the barbershop had a tradition of being passed through protégés.

When Nalty went last summer with her meager business proposal to owner Rick Lozano, his response shocked her.

“I’ll rent you the whole effing thing,” she recalled Lozano saying.

After a few more meetings to hash out the deal, it became official. Nalty took over as the 3456 S. Broadway barbershop’s fifth owner.

A legacy of keeping it ‘old school’

Lozano himself was ready to retire when the pandemic hit. Back pain was a growing hindrance. His feet hurt, too. But he didn’t want to close the beloved Englewood establishment, so he waited for someone who would treasure the “blue-collar working man barbershop” before taking it off his plate.

“I wanted somebody to come in that would carry on what I’ve seen for the last 36 years,” Lozano, 60, said. “I wanted to keep it the old school way, the way it’s been since it opened up.”

Its doors first opened in 1909 as the O.K. Bathhouse and Barbershop until 1935, when its namesake Sam Hill took over. Lozano first started at Sam Hill’s in 1988 when former owner Dick Konecne hired him. Konecne himself worked under Hill for more than a decade before buying the place in 1969. And like his predecessor, Lozano bought the shop in 2005.

Downtown Englewood changed a lot over the century, while most of the barbershop stayed the same, Lozano said. A side door inside Sam Hill’s — once an alley entrance — has been blocked for decades by the wall of the next-door building currently home to a Mexican restaurant.

The area grew into the “Golden Mile” of business for the South Denver suburb, bustling with shops until the Cinderella City Mall, the largest shopping center west of the Mississippi River, opened in 1968 and foot traffic gravitated in its direction. The barbershop was hurt by the downturn, Lozano said, but it outlived the mall, which saw its last tenant leave in 1997.

The downtown saw a revival again before the pandemic, Lozano said. Despite the period of shutdowns, business picked back up and it has become “a destination area now.” Today, Sam Hill’s is surrounded by craft stores, vegan and Asian-American restaurants, diners, cocktail bars, a brewery and a kid’s theater.

When Nalty said she would commit to keeping the barbershop as close to its original state, Lozano knew he found the right person.

“When she came over that day, I’m just like, hey, it was a blessing,” Lozano said.

A restoration project

The first task for Nalty, who grew up in Littleton and has been a hair stylist for more than two decades, was to restore the building.

As the new face of the business, Nalty saw skepticism from the community and recalled people asking her how she was going to ruin Sam Hill’s or make it too “hipster.” She told them to “come back and see.” She finished restoring the building at the end of 2023.

“I didn’t lead up to too much or explain too much,” Nalty said. “I knew that I wouldn’t disappoint them because I was gonna put everything back up on the walls — and in an even better way.”

Nalty’s renovation project swapped out the 1970s lights for fixtures from the early 1900s. There was a storage room in the back she converted back into a beauty shop from the barbershop’s 1950s period. She sourced through architectural salvage stores to find antique furnishings true to the barbershop’s age.

One example is a new coffee and cocktail bar made out of a prohibition-era judge’s bench from the prison in Cañon City at the back of the beauty room, where clients can now get pedicures.

Her team tore out the floors and found original linoleum from the 1920s. They covered a portion of it in a glass panel so guests can safely walk over it and see back in time. Then the original panel walls got a wood shining to make them look new again.

There’s also some modern changes.

For the first time in the barbershop’s history, it now has Wi-Fi.

It’s no longer a cash-only business.

Customers can also book appointments online.

It had to keep up with the times in some ways, but for those wanting the classic experience Sam Hill’s has provided since 1909, Nalty said the shop still takes walk-ins and cash.

In addition to barber and grooming services, Sam Hill’s added new features like pedicures, waxing and facials.

Columbine resident John Zakhem came in for a pedicure on a Wednesday afternoon, a first for him, and said he liked the establishment’s old time feel with a modern touch.

“Who doesn’t love a whiskey with a pedicure?,” Zakhem said.

The business also had a slight name change under Nalty. It’s now called Sam Hill’s Barbershop by Arrow, tying back to her salon across the street. Each business has a separate feel and niche, Nalty said, but there’s plenty of cross promotion.

Husbands who are regular clients at Sam Hill’s refer their wives to Arrow Beauty 200 feet away, Nalty said.

As she said she would, Nalty returned everything on the walls from old newspaper clippings, photographs of past owners, their old barber’s licenses, mounted cow skulls and the taxidermy pheasants and ducks Lozano hunted himself.

So far, Nalty said, the reception has been good.

There’s some who say they hate the changes and will never come back again, she said, yet they still keep returning every few weeks and mutter the same thing again.

But the best part for Nalty is when long-time customers come back and share memories of coming in before their life’s biggest moments or how their fathers brought them into Sam Hill’s for their first trim.

“We have men sit there with all of us and tell stories and get a little teary eyed,” Nalty said.

It was one of the reasons why she wanted to buy Sam Hill’s in the first place.

“I felt that spirit of it. I did for years looking in there,” Nalty said. “I knew it was special that way and that it was special to a lot of people.”