How did we get here?

Opened in 2019, UDC/Laguna Outpost is a showroom and design lab for Caleb Siemon and Carmen Salazar. The design duo behind United Glassblowing and Siemon & Salazar, they have been working, living, and making art together since 1999. UGB and S&S focused on handblown glass rooted in modern minimalism. Their work embraced 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. In 2022 after two decades at the UGB Santa Ana studio, the pair closed up shop and sold their lighting brand, Siemon & Salazar, to their friends at Cerno. They continue to be involved in S&S as design directors. The United Design Club/Laguna Outpost will continue to showcase Caleb and Carmen’s glass vessels, objects, unique explorations, and selected works from Siemon & Salazar as well as act as a studio for Carmen’s landscape design and a place for Caleb & Carmen to explore new ideas and design work. Feel free to peek in the windows and please call or email us with any questions or if you would like to make an appointment.

Carmen Salazar-

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, Caleb Siemon.

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 of 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. 25 years later… Caleb is a master glassblower and talented maker and designer in whatever medium he chooses. His innate curiosity and unshakeable enthusiasm for the world around him continues to inform his design directions.