Casa Salcido Today
In 2022, Chef Silvana married Dra. Serina Payan Hazelwood, beginning a new chapter in the life of Casa Salcido. In 2023, they made the move to Baja California full time, bringing together two women, two creative practices, and a shared desire to fill this extraordinary estate with life, love, learning, and purpose.
Together, they began imagining what Casa Salcido could become. Chef Silvana brought a lifetime of culinary knowledge, Mexican foodways, artistry, and gathering people around the table. Serina brought her work in sustainability education, regenerative design, permaculture, rematriation, and relationships with food, land, water, plants, and community. As wives and partners, they began creating something neither had imagined alone.
Casa Salcido is a place to share, cook and eat together. To grow food and medicine. To teach children. To gather around the table con chisme. To welcome family and community. To host retreats and celebrations. To care for animals. To rest. To make art. To honor culture. To remember. And to continue asking how this home can give back to the land and community that nourish it.
Casa Salcido is still our home. We simply believe a home this abundant is meant to be shared.
Casa Salcido Highlights
Taller de Cocina Mexicana
Our professional teaching kitchen
Our professional kitchen is home to Taller de Cocina Mexicana, our tuition-free culinary school for neighborhood children and young people. It is also where Chef Silvana teaches, creates, and prepares many of the culinary experiences shared with guests at Casa Salcido.
La Cocina
Where everyday life happens
Separate from our professional teaching kitchen, our home kitchen remains exactly that. It is where we cook for ourselves, experiment, preserve what is growing, feed animals from kitchen scraps, make coffee, talk, laugh, and live our everyday lives.
Stay & Rest
3 guest bedrooms • 3 bedroom suites • 2 apartments
Casa Salcido offers spaces for individuals, couples, families, and small groups to stay with us, making it possible to settle into the rhythm of the Casa for retreats, culinary immersions, and multi-day gatherings.
Patios & Gathering Spaces
The Low-Rider Show Garage
7 patios • courtyard • 2 salas • 2 dining areas • bar
Casa Salcido was built for gathering. Across the property, indoor and outdoor spaces allow meals, conversations, celebrations, retreats, classes, and community gatherings to move throughout the Casa and change with the season.
Wellness Room
The Low-Rider Show Garage
The Low-Rider Show Garage
A space for rest, movement & restoration
Our dedicated wellness room creates space for yoga, meditation, bodywork, movement, quiet practice, and the wellness offerings that become part of retreats and gatherings at the Casa.
The Low-Rider Show Garage
The Low-Rider Show Garage
The Low-Rider Show Garage
Cars, culture & community
Our show-car garage opens Casa Salcido to another kind of gathering. Lowrider clubs, artists, families, and community come together around cars, food, music, storytelling, and a culture where artistry, identity, memory, and generations meet.
Apothecary & Botánica
Plants, medicine & remembering
Our apothecary and botánica is a place to grow our relationships with plants and remember the knowledge our abuelas and ancestors carried. Here, herbs and botanicals are grown, gathered, dried, preserved, studied, and prepared for teas, food, medicine, and traditional uses, while we continue learning what it means to work with plants with reciprocity, respect, and responsibility.
Greenhouses & Growing Spaces
Two greenhouses • culinary & medicinal gardens
Our two greenhouses are part of a larger growing ecosystem that includes our food forest, culinary and medicinal gardens, pollinator habitat, and plants grown as food and forage for both human and other-than-human relatives.
Our Animal Relatives
Ducks • chickens • rabbits & the wild ones who visit
Our 23 (and counting) animals are participants in the Casa Salcido ecosystem. Their habitats are integrated throughout the property, where food scraps become nourishment, manure returns to the soil, plants provide forage, and caring for them reminds us that relationship always carries responsibility.
The Food Forest
Food • medicine • habitat • reciprocity
Our food forest is where many of the relationships at Casa Salcido come together. Fruit trees, vegetables, herbs, medicinal plants, flowers, nopal, and forage grow alongside one another, nourishing people, animals, pollinators, birds, insects, and the soil. We do not grow food only for ourselves. We grow as participants in an ecosystem where what the land gives is shared, returned, and grown again.
Solar Energy
Powered in part by the sun
Solar energy is part of our continuing work toward a more regenerative Casa. Our solar system helps power daily life across the property while reducing our dependence on outside energy resources.
Water Stewardship
Rainwater harvesting • greywater reuse • earthworks
Water is sacred, particularly here in Baja California. We harvest rainwater, reuse greywater, and work with swales, basins, and the contours of the land to slow water, hold it, and return as much as possible to the soil.