The Quality Makers: Richard Christiansen of Flamingo Estate

Tell me about Flamingo Estate. 

It's a pink house on the top of the hill. It was a house before it was a business, and it has a really wild and interesting past. It was this amazing hedonistic playground in the middle of Los Angeles. It’s been a porn studio for 65 years, a political activist center, a community center and even a radio station. Over time, the city built itself around it, and it got lost in plain sight. I found it 10 years ago, restored it, and that's where we are now.

I found it really serendipitously. I bought it from an old man who had lived there for 65 years, and it was basically a tear down. But it had this crazy big, unfathomable garden that had languished for decades, but you could see that at one point, someone really loved it. It was this emerald green jewel in the middle of the city, this sprawling garden that everyone had forgotten about. 

How has your personal journey led to the creation of your home? What sparked your interest in transforming your home into a business? 

It happened in a 3-week window. I had my own business, a creative agency, for 20 years, and when Covid hit, almost all of our clients stopped spending money overnight. All of a sudden, I had no work, but also personally, I was just exhausted from decades of hard work in New York and the other offices overseas. I had been the quarterback for the business. I was always running, always pitching, always thinking. But I was out of alignment, super unhealthy, drinking too much and sleeping too little. When things fell apart, I wasn’t doing all that anymore, I was just home. I sat in the garden, I took long, hot baths and I cooked good meals. I restored the house, but the house, at the same time, was very much restoring me. 

Around the same time, I met a farmer who was going to lose her farm because her vegetables went to all restaurants that had closed. I told her to bring her vegetables over and we'd sell them. That very first Friday of Covid, we sold 300 boxes of vegetables. The next weekend, we sold 600, the weekend after that, we sold 1200 and it just kept going. I had worked in luxury goods my whole life, so I naturally started making stuff look beautiful and branding it well. The farms just kept multiplying as I met more and more of these incredible regenerative farmers, and now we're at 128 farms. Somewhere in that journey, rather than just selling produce, we started making stuff. People would come to me saying: ‘I heard you’re helping out farmers. I've got 7 acres of sage, or I've got 30 acres of lavender.’ I started making products that I wanted to use, like soap and candles. We just played and played and played, and ended up making 150 products in those first two years. Eventually, when the world woke up from Covid, I realized we had this huge business, and we didn't even plan for it. 

Tell me about the different kinds of people you work with, all around the world. 

Our farms are found largely across California and Mexico, but we’ve also had manuka honey from New Zealand, tea from Japan, Bergamot from Italy, and we’ve pulled native oils from outback Australia too. At my old job, I feel like I got to work with all my heroes, all the photographers, all the famous people I could dream of, all the cinematographers and all the people I worshiped as a kid. But the farmers I've been working with more recently, they really are the most creative people in the world. They're the people who are growing things the right way – sage for anxiety, mugwort for dreaming and mushrooms for calm. They’re working with mother nature in a way that we've forgotten. In a world where we are drunk on innovation, and we're always chasing the new thing, the fast thing, the algorithm and the AI of it all, we’ve forgotten the most incredible of things – the old things, the timeline of things, and the sacred ways of creating that are not innovative. 

Flamingo, as a home, was very much designed that way. I don't have a television or a microwave. There’s no shortcuts here. We're trying to do things the slow way, the way that sucks up time, not makes things easier. I just wrote a book that's coming out on December 3rd, called The Guide to Becoming Alive. It's 600 pages long and there’s an interview in every chapter. In one of those interviews, this guy David says that the promise of things like technology and AI is to give us more time to do the things that we want to do. But the problem is, it hasn't ended up that way. What that promise has done, is killed is this idea of ceremony that we need so deeply. That's why people go to church, it's why people have friendship groups, but it’s also why we take the time to set a table or make a slow meal. I’ve said it time and time again: a hot bath and a good meal is the best medicine for everything. I steadfastly believe that, still.

Tell me more about your book.

Each chapter is about a plant and what it can teach us. Then, there’s a long interview integrated into each chapter, with someone who personifies that plant. There’s some great interviews with Martha Stewart, Jane Fonda, Jane Goodall, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend – all of my luminaries. People I respect and admire so much, I ask them all the same question: how did you become alive? It's so interesting because there’s as many as 16 interviews, and some people are very rich, some are poor, some are very famous, some are not, but they're all finding their way, and none of them have done it in a straight line. They've all halted, and they've all had setbacks. 

What comes up in almost every interview is that we have to put our phones down. We are in love with our phones, and we have to put them away. Each interviewee said they were only able to find their path once they got their hands in the soil, cooked a meal or spent time with their friends. And on top of that, it was so heartwarming to hear that none of them have it all figured out. That gave me a real sense of calm. Everyone, even my heroes, are just doing their best. 

With ceremonial, sacred spaces, comes a lot of ancestral and multicultural wisdom. I'm curious about the exchange you have with the farmers you work with, and how that knowledge gets transferred into how you create and design products?

First of all, I’m a white guy from Australia. I shouldn't be, and don't want to be, culturally appropriating or taking credit for anything that someone else has done. We're trying really hard to make sure that if people are doing something, we shine a light on their way of doing it. But having said that, there's universals across all the places I've traveled and the people I've met, around deep appreciation. Think about the milpa system in Mexico - their way of farming, treating soil well and crop rotation. It’s been going on for generations. Adjacent to that, there’s a general custodial-like respect for the earth. I recently came back from Australia, and I felt very ignorant because I didn't learn this stuff as a kid growing up there, but aboriginals have many seasons throughout the year, not just four. It's listening to the planet that informs their seasons. It's very nuanced. It's very aware. Very impressive. It’s that real sacred honoring of the world, which we need more of because the world is on fire. 

I actually grew up in a farming family in Australia, so the fact that my parents didn't communicate indigenous wisdom clearly enough to me, blows my mind. What I saw was that we were taking from rather than giving back to. I hope, as we scale and grow, that we continue to work with people who are really giving back so they change the way that any big brand would source or get their ingredients. 

If you want people to think about the environment differently, you have to show it to them differently. That’s why this brand doesn't feel crunchy, or very granola. For Christmas this year, my partner bought me every old Hermès catalog ever printed. We sat there over the space between Christmas Day and New Year's Eve, with some wine, and we just read them all, cover to cover. There was this beautiful Hermès catalog, in the 80s at the height of its pretentiousness, and it said something along the lines of: ‘Hermès is about the collision of the craftsman's hand and the finest materials. If we're too expensive for you, remember that it's because the collision of these things have become increasingly rarer.’ 

It was a really nice way to say, we don't care if you don't sit with us. But also a real appreciation for this idea of nature as luxury, craftsmanship as luxury, and scarcity as luxury. We feel the same way about the lavender in our fields. Those farms can't produce anymore, they're also scarce and luxurious. 

Your website states: ‘Flamingo Estate is a reminder that beauty is not so much the pension of certain people for exceptional things as it is their refusal to stand for anything less.’ Can you please elaborate?

We like to say that the house is a place of radical pleasure. Today we're flying food from across the world, we're paying peanuts to farmers for production, and the nutritional value of food in supermarkets is significantly lower than it ever was before. We should not be paying less for food. We should be paying more for it because farmers need more money. My olive oil ($48) is from trees that are 150 years old, and it takes us a year to make it. 

In terms of bath & body and beauty products – as a society, we’re buying these generic ingredients from suppliers, but we have no idea where they come from. We don't know their impact or how good they are. It's so easy to use something synthetic and call it nice. A really good quality of life is about having no shortcuts, and it's not about being rich either. It’s about really good food that's grown locally or grown in my backyard. It’s about really understanding where the things you buy come from. I'm probably going to buy less of something, but it’s going to be of better quality. It’s about eating well, and editing out of your life the stuff that’s shit, including your friends. Standing up for your own pleasure is a real radical act. 

Flamingo is a very selfish brand. It started because I made things that I personally needed to wake in the morning and go to bed at night – the best soap, the best coffee ($26), the best wine and the best food I can have at dinner, the best shampoo ($50) I can use during my bath. For me, it was about being committed to things that smell great, taste great and feel great. I would like to be part of the conversation about the real value of things.

What are your hopes for the future of Flamingo Estate?

The first thing I hope is that we continue to act small, even as we grow bigger. This is my home, it’s very personal and it’s going to remain that way. But I’m also not messing around – this is not a hobby. I want to build a billion dollar brand and we are on our way. No one has done that sourcing the way we do, and with our sense of transparency and care. I refuse to be a brand that loses its way once it scaled. Otherwise, I hope everyone gets to start a new chapter at one point in their life. Simply by having a hot bath and cooking a good meal, like I did. 

‍Curate your own home of radical pleasure here.