Photographer KANYA IWANA
Instagram: @flamingo_estate
flamingoestate.com
The Flamingo Estate founder Richard Christiansen went from big city advertising exec to down-to-earth farmer, creating a chic culinary and lifestyle empire. His advice? Get your hands dirty and always keep curious.
When Richard Christiansen was growing up in the small Australian outback town of Duranbah, there was little that appealed to him less than the idea of a life spent getting his hands dirty. “I came from generations of farmers,” including both his parents, Christiansen tells me from Los Angeles in July. “I could not wait to get away from it and just run as far away from that dirt and farming as possible.” And that’s what he did, leaving for London and then New York, where he started his own agency, Chandelier Creative, in 2005 and built up an impressive roster of fashionable clients (Hermès, Nike, Rhode, Neiman Marcus, Khaite) that only required him to break a sweat in the most extreme circumstances. So no one finds it funnier than he that he’s “now back and working as a fancy-vegetable salesman,” as he puts it. What he’s referring to, of course, is Flamingo Estate, the small Los Angeles farm-focused, decadently Earth-friendly empire he has built around his own perfectly decorated home here. But maybe it was always going to happen this way, he says. “The thing you run away from is always the thing that catches up with you.”
In order to tell this story we have to first return to the rut in which he found himself in New York, which, in Flamingo-friendly terms, led to the rooting and then the ripening. Christiansen was exhausted in New York, he says. “I was really unhealthy and I was working all the time, and I think I was craving a way out of that. And I knew that it had something to do with simple things—a good meal, a hot bath, sex, and music, and getting back in my body and living at full volume. I just felt like I’d been sleepwalking. But you know, when you grow up on a farm and you earn more than your parents do, who are you to complain about your privileged life in New York?”
Still, he knew he needed a change of scenery. He moved to Los Angeles in 2017 and found a hilltop home in Highland Park (at the time occupied by a former porn producer prone to hoarding), enlisted the designers Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty of Studio KO to take over the redesign, “and moved here, really in the hope that as I kind of restored the orchard and restored the house, that it would do the same to me.” From certain angles, the house stood big and pink and tall and proud from its perch above the sprawling fantasia of Los Angeles; he named it Flamingo Estate.
ater, several serendipitous things happened at once: Christiansen, who had opened both an LA outpost of Chandelier and a Studio KO-designed art and design-minded bookstore called Owl Bureau, found himself at home with time to spare. He met the deeply talented creative director Aaron Harvey—now Flamingo’s head of creative as well as his partner—and they in turn met a local regenerative farmer whose entire client base was restaurants that had now closed down. Moved by the memory of his own parents losing their farm when he was young, Christiansen offered to help sell some vegetables.
The Flamingo Estate boxes, which were sent to tastemakers around the city, were not just any CSA boxes. They were beautiful CSA boxes bursting with sumptuous local produce and charmingly printed recipe booklets that encouraged an engagement with presence, craft, and creativity: catnip for the home-bound Los Angelean. The recipients posted pictures on Instagram and soon the boxes began to sell out; The New York Times called it “nutrition porn for the quarantined.” Suddenly there was interest in the other things happening at the estate, like the garden-scented candles Christiansen had been selling at Owl Bureau—Harvey redesigned the labels to today’s iconic pale pinks and greens with elegant curling typeface to fit the rest of the estate’s aesthetic—and the rest is history. Today there is a network of 125 farms whose Flamingo-selected goods go out across LA every Friday, as well as a robust and internationally available line of Earth-friendly bath and body products, scented candles, dried fruits and coffee beans, oils and honeys, and a growing library of lavishly printed coffee table books filled with gauzy, romantic images from the estate. “They created this very, very magical world,” the photographer and frequent Flamingo collaborator Pia Riverola says. “You just want to be a part of it.”
It helped how beautiful every-thing was, how lush the setting, how sexy the catalog (which was filled with photographs of fruit and vegetables shot like luxury fashion pieces, included rhapsodic odes to pleasure and purpose and, in terms of the bath and body content, rivaled early Abercrombie & Fitch editions for toothsome nudes), how perfect the vibe for a world that had then started reemerging like a seedling peeking out from the ground, eager to feel something again, to bloom. Soon, everyone in LA wanted to see the estate, to have a photograph or a party or a moment there, perhaps not entirely realizing that as much as Flamingo Estate is a symbolic nonstop pleasure palace, it is also very much a private home, where Christiansen and Harvey actually live with their two dogs, and do not always love when strangers ring the doorbell asking to use it as a backdrop.
RICHARD CHRISTIANSEN
FOUNDER
AARON HARVEY
HEAD OF CREATIVE
KAT TURNER
CHEF AND COLLABORATOR
The estate partnered with Mytheresa on a tongue-in-cheek solution last winter, creating a life-size gingerbread replica of the house (down to the David Hockney Caribbean Tea Time screen from the living room and Smeg toaster in the kitchen) in an empty storefront in Highland Park so that would-be visitors could get their fix that way. And shop, of course, including for themed gingerbread cookies next door. About 2,500 people turned up on opening day.
A hilltop historical hedonist enclave turned curative back-to-the-land idyll turned runaway retail success might sound like the stuff of an early-aughts romantic comedy, but what is California for if not pursuing a dream? Every year the company has doubled in size, Christiansen says, adding one of his favorite axioms: “Mother Nature is the last great luxury house.” Chessie Keebaugh, who arrived as an intern at Chandelier Creative in New York and rose through the ranks there before leaving to help launch Flamingo and eventually become its head of brand, had a front row seat to Christiansen’s transformation from Mad Men to Martha Stewart. “I feel like I watched him grow up, which is insane because he was already 40,” she says, “but I feel like I watched him fall back in love with who he is as a person and also discover his purpose.” She still has him saved as “Willy Wonka” in her phone. Meaning he’s a dreamer of a particularly wild sort, but the kind who makes the dreams real, in such a way that you can actually throw your arms around them or build a whole new life inside. From the beginning, “I really believed in him,” she says, “in this person who did not say no, was down for any challenge, anything.”
Alex Bolar, a chef who regularly caters Flamingo Estate events, met Christiansen by chance while working in Atlanta a little over three years ago; the latter extended an offer to come and cook back in LA nearly on the spot. “He’s gentle but he knows what he wants,” Bolar says, plus, “he takes time to listen.” (Including to customers: He has been known to send out his own phone number in the CSA boxes for feedback.) “He’s made it so personal to himself and to the people there,” Bolar says. “It’s a family.”
Riverola tells me Christiansen “has the energy and the soul of a child,” one that’s open to whatever fabulous idea takes form—filling the estate’s fountain with fruit, stuffing a vintage car with roses for a photo—no matter how fantastical. We could all do to be a bit more like that, she says, “sometimes we grow up and we become boring, and don’t explore that childlike side anymore… I think part of what makes him create such wonderful worlds is because he’s still dreaming.” He’s also still doing: Among his forthcoming endeavors is a new book, The Guide to Becoming Alive, a 600-page tome incorporating interviews with people like Jane Fonda and Martha Stewart and Jane Goodall and Alice Waters. “The funny thing is all of them, high and low, rich and poor, famous and non-famous, they all kind of said sort of the same thing,” Christiansen tells me. “They were like, get off your phone and go out and plant something, smell something, taste something, eat something. Go out and experience the world, because our human experience is getting shallower and shallower and stupider and stupider because we’re just experiencing stuff through this little phone and we’re not in the world anymore.” It makes the argument for the importance and urgency of this kind of work, he says—“Let’s get into the world and use our heads and leave it better than we found it.”
A lot of people have big, crazy dreams, Harvey says, but this one only really works because of the dreamer. “This stuff doesn’t happen by accident,” he tells me of Flamingo’s success. “It’s really such a big testament to the sun that shines directly on Richard. You know, I’ve had a ton of great ideas before, and I have been super-good at my job for a very, very long time. But the synergy of putting the right people in the right places, pushing when you need to push, taking the gas off when you need to, letting there be magic when it needs to be magical, and letting it be quite tenacious when you need that—it’s really very natural for him.” Put another way, he says, “I don’t know that this thing would have ever happened had it not been for this mix of people at that very specific moment in human history.”
Before Flamingo Estate became a business, Christiansen says, his goal was simple: to make everything he personally needed, “from coffee when I woke up in the morning to the soap I used in the shower to the alcohol I used at night. Just everything I needed all day long, made well.” That’s still true. “I don’t wanna overthink it, I just want to make stuff that I really love, with people that I really admire and respect.” One thing, at least, has changed, certainly since those early days in Duranbah. “I think there’s some real benefit in trying to get your hands dirty, and sweat, and keep curious,” Christiansen says. “After all these years, I’ve come to really admire the dirt under someone’s fingernails much, much more than the jewelry on their hand.”
EMILY BERNSTEIN
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
ALEX BOLAR
CHEF AND COLLABORATOR
CHESSIE KEEBAUG
HHEAD OF BRAND
from left: Kat Turner, Aaron Harvey, Alex Bolar, Richard Christiansen, Chessie Keebaugh, and Emily Bernstein with Richard and Aaron’s dogs, Daylesford and Freeway, on the hillside staircase of Flamingo Estate
