How did we get here?

The OutPost began as a showroom, store, and design lab for Siemon & Salazar and United Design Club. Caleb Siemon and Carmen Salazar are the design duo behind Siemon & Salazar and have been working, living, and making art together since 1999. Focused on handblown glass and rooted in modern minimalism, their work embraces the Muranese tradition of glass, the balance and restraint of the Scandinavian aesthetic and the couple’s love for the culture and landscape of California. With their main studio in Santa Ana, the Outpost offered a chance for Caleb & Carmen to explore new creative avenues and find opportunities to engage with their Laguna Beach community. Residents since 2002, they wanted to bring their work closer to home and their two kids. The Outpost has evolved into a showroom for select C+C and S&S pieces, Carmen’s studio for her exterior design clients and a place for Caleb & Carmen to explore new ideas.

A curious hybrid of urban and rural, Carmen is a recipe that calls for equal parts concrete and pasture, glass and steel and rough-hewn beams. She has a varied past in architecture and landscape design, sculpture, metalworking, botany, and scavenging. She believes in creating works that are beautiful and functional.  Carmen is a lover of many types of design from mid-century modernism and brutal minimalism, to baroque overabundance and hippie farm houses.She is trained as a designer, sculptor, and architect, and has worked as a landscape designer on luxury estates as well on the design team for the Orange County Great Park. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture, and Art History from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Masters in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Since 2008 she has run the design studio at Siemon & Salazar and UDC with her husband and partner extraordinaire, Caleb Siemon.

Caleb is the son of a jeweler and a painter. He grew up making things with his hands, got hooked on glass in high school, and honed his craft at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he and Carmen met. He then set out for Murano, Italy, and spent two years in the Muranese studio with Pino Signoretto, a glassmaker versatile enough to produce both enormous sculptures and delicate goblets. When he returned to Southern California in 1999, he constructed his own Italian-style glassblowing studio fueled by a passion for the medium and a desire to carry on the centuries old art. He named the studio United Glassblowing and enlisted the help of a group of friends, which included Carmen who thought she was just coming down for a visit. 20 years later…

After two decades in their UGB Santa Ana studio, the duo sold Siemon & Salazar to their friends at Cerno. They continue to be involved in the brand as design directors as well as creating new one of a kind and limited edition work for clients around the world.

The Outpost will continue to showcase selected works from Siemon & Salazar as well as vessels, objects and unique explorations by Caleb + Carmen. Feel free to peek in the windows and please email us with any questions or if you would like to make an appointment.