Santa Barbara Glassblowing Studio
Saul Alcaraz spends his days marshalling the forces of
his creative fires - his own and the 2000 degree furnace at his company, Santa Barbara Glassblowing Studio.A twenty-five-year glass-blowing veteran, Alcaraz turns out artistic, mostly functional pieces that have found their way into the collections of Michael Jackson, Sigourney Weaver, and Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, for whom he created a pair of wedding-day goblets and a carafe.
He made the trophies for the 2010 International Cinematographers awards and hosts celebrities and others who drop by his studio for classes or just to try their hand at glass blowing.
Whether creating enormous onion or bell-pepper-shaped lights for the new Casa Blanca restaurant, more than thirty custom fixtures for the de Bruyn Kops house, see page 78, two-foot-long squids for a gallery in Waikiki Beach, or one of the opalescent pieces - decanters, lamps, vases, bottles and more - from his vast array of Art Nouveau objects, a particular specialty, Alcaraz brings to his work a mastery of the craft that few can match. His whimsical pieces include ocean-inspired sea-turtle and jellyfish lights, fantastic planet-Earth paper weights - and even the solar system in blown glass for a new house on the Riviera.
Beyond his design skills, Alcaraz also makes many of his own, commercially unavailable colors and has the rare ability to make custom pieces to exacting specifications (“the hardest thing for a glass blower to do”) and re-create fine works from the past. “Antiques are my specialty,” he says. “If somebody broke a piece from the ’30s or ’40s, I can reproduce it.”
706 East Mason Street, Santa Barbara
805.965.1541
