It was hair that brought them together.
It was hair that split them apart — almost.
After 33 years of marriage, Joanne Liuzzo can laugh at how her husband Mario practically ended their relationship before it began. The 62-year-old co-owner of Mario’s International Spas & Hotels tells the tale while her 68-year-old partner in business and life watches the last minutes of an NFL playoff game at the bar of their flagship Aurora property.
It was 1960, and Joanne, then a student at a now-defunct Maple Heights beauty school, was attending a hair show in Cleveland with her mother. Mario, a stylist who operated a new Maple Heights shop, noticed the young woman’s head of thick, shoulder-length brown hair.
“He walks over, takes all my hair, and pulls it up,” she remembers. “He wanted to look at my neckline — that was very important for styling. He said, ‘How’d you like to model for me?’”
For the next couple of years, Joanne allowed her hair to be colored and coaxed into fantastical styles; her only payment was the coiffure she modeled. When she graduated from beauty school in 1963, Joanne assumed the hairdresser would be happy to give her a job after all the times she’d loaned her locks to him. Instead, Mario told her she needed to get a year’s experience at another salon.
“I really disliked him because he didn’t hire me,” she recalls.
A year later, however, Mario called Joanne and offered her a position as a stylist. They married in 1967 and began building a collection of five Northeast Ohio locations that have made the name Mario’s synonymous with the word spa.
In 1993, Conde Nast Traveler named the Aurora location one of the top 10 spas in the United States. Over the years, the hotel register and spa appointment book has included the names of David Letterman, Olympic figure skating champion Kristi Yamaguchi, Las Vegas crooner Wayne Newton and opera star Sarah Brightman. Joanne says their success in the salon business has resulted as much from her love of acquiring and rehabilitating old buildings as from Mario’s knack for wielding a pair of scissors.
“It seemed like things would knock on our door,” she adds, referring to the opportunities that led to each expansion. “But we took a lot of chances, and we worked really hard. We spent our lives devoted to it.”
Both Joanne, who grew up in the Canadian Maritime Province of New Brunswick, and Mario, a first-generation American whose parents emigrated from Italy and settled in Cleveland, say they enrolled in beauty school because it was an affordable alternative to college.
“I thought I’d make a good living,” says Mario, who opened a his first salon in 1960 with a $13,000 down payment provided by his godfather. His instincts were correct. By the time Joanne arrived in 1964, Mario had already hired three other stylists — all of whom still work for him today — to handle the business in his thriving establishment. He was doing well enough to consider a second location by 1970, when a client from Chagrin Falls suggested opening a salon there in a spot occupied by a hairdresser going out of business.
“It was just a disaster,” Joanne says of the onetime blacksmith’s shop. “Poison ivy was growing in the window. The man was working in his bare feet — the state board would never allow that kind of thing today. But it really was cute, and being on the water, (the location was really, really nice.)”
Mario dispatched Joanne — who was less than thrilled to leave the familial atmosphere of the Maple Heights location — to work in the new outpost alone. A few year later, the couple was shopping when they spotted a gas station for sale in Parma.
“We both said at the same time, ‘Wow, that would make a nice beauty shop,’” Joanne said.
The Liuzzos bought the gas station and opened their West Side shop in 1977. Mario, who saw no reason to rent property when he could own it, closed the Maple Heights location in 1984.
Eight years later, Joanne struck out on her own again, this time to take over a tiny Aurora salon the Liuzzos bought from a retiring stylist. Four years later, in 1977, a client asked if she’d be interested in buying an mid-19th century residence down the road.
“It looked like a haunted house,” remembers Joanne, who was nevertheless smitten with the dilapidated place. “Mario wasn’t even in town. I’m thinking, ‘He’s not gonna want to buy this.’”
By the time Mario returned, Joanne had signed on the dotted line for the house and the two acres on which it sat. But Mario shared his wife’s enthusiasm for the property. Refurbishing the Chagrin Falls location, however, had kindled a love of old. The couple promptly sold their Aurora shop and, after two years of renovations, the first Mario’s International Spa opened its doors in 1980.
The Victorian retreat offered massages, facials, manicures, pedicures, a whirlpool, sauna, steam room, exercise room and, of course, a full-service hair salon — a place, in short, where working women could get everything done under one roof. Joanne believes that Mario’s was one of only six or seven spas operating in the country at the time — a fact that drew plenty of out-of-town visitors, thanks to her press mailings.
At first, the Liuzzos made reservations for overnight guests at the Aurora Inn directly across Garfield Road. Patrons dined on food fetched from the inn’s restaurant in the spa’s tea parlor.
“That became very cumbersome,” she says. “My employees were running across the street with boxes all day in the snow, in the traffic.”
The lodging dilemma was solved in 1984, when a neighboring homeowner offered to sell the Liuzzos his property — a deal spawned by his concerns about the couple’s plans to put in a never-built outdoor pool. The century home was converted into a four-bedroom guest house and kitchen.
The couple began building a rambling home of their own in 1988, complete with a showplace for Mario’s collection of antique cars, on an acre between the guest house and a recently-acquired gas station they converted into office space.
“All of a sudden, once we got going, we thought this would probably make a better hotel,” Joanne said.
The couple moved from Brecksville into the guest house instead. An 1840s cabin that came with the guest house property was outfitted with a new roof, connected to both the hotel and spa, and dubbed the Cabin Lounge. It eventually replaced the hotel restaurant as the property’s main dining room after an expansion.
In 1997, the couple added two locations, a spa and wellness center at Akron General Hospital and a spa at Beachwood Place. Their newest property is the Sanctuary, a year-old new-age health and wellness center located in a rehabilitated barn across the street from the hotel on State Route 306. Here, clients can experience yoga, reiki, shiro dara, reflexology, aromatherapy, raindrop therapy and ayurvedic cuisine.
Joanne gave up doing hair when the Aurora spa opened to manage the ever-growing Mario’s empire. She haunts the corporate offices, now located in yet another home the business has purchased. But Mario is still very much the stylist, dividing his time between the Chagrin Falls, Parma and Aurora locations.
“He says that’s what he wants to be doing when his time comes — cutting hair,” Joanne says. “He loves to cut hair.”
How to reach: Marios’s International Spa and Hotel in Aurora, (330) 562-9171