How a Pandemic-Era Escape Became Los Angeles's Hottest Lifestyle Brand
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
“It’s the garden.” Flamingo Estate founder Richard Christiansen gives me the same answer to yet another question. “It's always the garden. It's my dogs, it's my goats. It's listening. It’s getting dirt under your fingernails. Cooking something and tasting something.”
At least one of the questions I asked was what is the key to a well-lived life, and for Christiansen, the garden is at least a good place to start. In his new book, The Guide to Becoming Alive (out today), the man behind the celebrity-beloved lifestyle company, tells the story of the Los Angeles house he discovered at a time of personal and professional crisis. Christiansen's gorgeous, moody photographs illustrate his origin story, which is interspersed with a series of interviews with personal heroes, including Jane Goodall, Martha Stewart, Jane Fonda, Chrissy Tiegen, and John Legend.
The garden in question laid the foundation for both Christiansen's brand and his own redemption. Five years ago, Christiansen helmed a well-known creative agency, Chandelier Creative, which was in perilous shape at the onset of the pandemic (the company is still alive and well today, though Christensen is no longer associated with it). “I had worked for 20 years to build my business. To have it fall apart in a matter of weeks was devastating. Then I realized how shallow my life was,” he says. “What a gift to be able to realize that while I still had a chance to do another couple of chapters in my life.”
The house, a former porn studio, is where Christiansen learned what came next. “This place is very much engineered around my own desire to be happy,” he says. A well-lived life, he says, “is about your senses firing on all cylinders.” He speaks to Goodall about finding a personal mission; deconstructs the concept of sex with artist Jobi Manson; asks chef Alice Waters how to divorcing yourself from technology; and gets a warning about teh dangers of endless scrolling from David Leon, co-founder of Farmer’s Footprint.
“I actually wish we didn't have any pictures in the book,” Christiansen says. “There's so much good writing in there. It’s bigger than the house.” Ahead, we speak to Christiansen about the process of curating the book, the ethos behind his brand, and his dream dinner party guest list.
What would you say the book is about?
Well, it's kind of a couple of books in one. We definitely talk about the house. There's a little bit of a Julie & Julia thing going on with that story—as I restored the house, it very much restored me. We started the business almost accidentally from the house. Through that process, I woke myself up from slumber. I really truly mean that. I wanted to get really sharp. I wanted to make sure that in the rest of my life I was as alive as possible. I wanted a chance to talk to my heroes and my friends about how they also became happy and felt alive, and in different metrics felt really successful and fulfilled. So that became this 600 page tome.
How did you go about selecting who you would speak with? Obviously they are all heroes to you, but what would you say is the connective tissue between everyone you chatted with?
They're all functioning at a really high vibration. They're all really productive and really driven by a clear intention to live a good life all day long, but in very different ways. Gonzalo, the farmer in Mexico who's doing a lot of environmental work, was one of my favorite interviews in the book. He's very different from Martha Stewart, but they're similar in the sense that they're really focusing on squeezing as much juice out of life as they can. Jane Goodall is very different from Jane Fonda, but there's this humanity and sense of greater purpose that connects every one of those people. I wanted to get some of that into my veins. I wanted to have some of that juice, and I lost myself in those interviews. They're so interesting. There are so many nuggets of wisdom.
Flamingo Estate: The Guide to Becoming Alive
What does it mean to you to live a wellness-oriented life?
I think both the book and the business are very selfish endeavors. It really is the most selfish business. I created the tools that I personally needed to wake myself back up. It started with the way things smelled. I wanted to get back inside my body. I wanted to feel hot again. I wanted to feel nourished again. I wanted to have real joy. I wanted to have sex. I wanted to live a vibrant, colorful life. I felt like I had been sleepwalking for years. It started with a good shower. Like a really good shower in the morning, which is why we started making soap. And then it moved to olive oil because I wanted to taste food again.
Product by product, even before we sold them, it was about making stuff in my home at the beginning of Covid to shake me back into my body again. The other thing that kept on coming up again and again was this idea of technology. In almost every interview, the answer to “How do you live a great life?” started with “Get off your telephone.”
If someone asked you that question, how you would live a pleasurable life, what would be your answer?
It would be the same answer I've always had. I'd go into the garden. Grow something, or make something, or cook something.
What does the word hot mean to you? How do you feel hot?
There's this chapter about sex with Jobi, who's a doula, an amazing sexual wellness sexpert. It's fascinating, because she talks about how everything is sex. This idea of raising your heartbeat, getting interested in the world, getting engaged, feeling seduced by something. Everything can have that really primal sexual feeling, even if it's just cooking or having a hot bath. She really broadened that definition. She talks about this time during Covid when she was living in the desert, quite solitary, but would find immense joy in being in having a hot bath or being under the trees or going for a long run. These are the moments of physical pleasure that she would get when she was on her own that had nothing to do with intercourse.
I know the estate and home are such a big part of all this. How did you work with Studio Ko to translate your aesthetic into your home? What did you want to look at every day?
I'm really allergic to the HGTV aesthetic of a home with an open plan. It's lazy. I'm not a fan of trends. The thing that Studio Ko has done so well in all of their projects is that they think more about how a space feels than how a space looks. I had just been through a hotel they had done in London called the Chiltern Firehouse. It was the weight of the drawers in the closet, the specific shade of light bulb above the bath that gave off just enough light to read, the height of a shelf next to the bathtub to have a drink with a long bath, these very small nuances that were very personal. That spirit continued with this. I knew how I wanted it to feel, even if I didn't know how I wanted it to look.
I don't believe in fast food. I don't believe in fast fashion. I don't believe in fast home. Nothing here was done the quick way. Everything was slowly collected over a long time. And it's not a massive home. It's one bedroom, but it's very, very, very thoughtful. And the garden is the most important room here. It’s where I spend most of my time. And it's definitely the biggest room of the house. Everything else is engineered to take advantage of that.
Holiday Wreath
Night Blooming Jasmine & Damask Rose Candle
Personalized Heritage Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Roma Heirloom Tomato Hand Soap
Manuka Rich Cream
Smoky Citrus Ornaments
Do you think you could have made this brand anywhere but Los Angeles?
The brand was the result of a couple of things that could never happen again. It was a combination of Covid and meeting a farmer who was going to lose her farm. One farm became five, five became the 128 farms we work with now. We’ve become this collision of farming meets design meets a bit of pop culture that could not happen anywhere but here. From a business point of view, those early boxes were delivered to celebrities across the city, and then they Instagrammed it. We very much were an Instagram-driven brand for a long time. People were Instagramming the vegetable box. When they were here, they would Instagram the house. That collision of Hollywood meets vegetables could never have happened anywhere else.
Los Angeles is such a special place because it's obviously the center of the world's imagination, but it's also the farm belt. It's also very witchy and a little bit weird. It's a nice collection of contradictions, this city. I think we reflect that quite well. We've worked so hard to put the culture in horticulture—like in the honey with LeBron James or with Kelly Wearstler. We’ve just released one with Ed Ruscha the artist and we have a big collaboration coming up with Gaetano Pesce, the Italian designer who died a year ago. If you want people to think about the environment differently, you need to show it to them differently—especially at a time when environmental change needs to happen now more than ever. Real loud alarm bells. It's the biggest crisis facing us, and we're distracted by TikTok. It's one of the reasons why I love the Jane Fonda interview in the book. With her fire drill Fridays and other climate activism work, she is trying so hard to get people to get involved and get mobilized. In a different way, we're very much trying to do the same thing.
Speaking of Jane Fonda, it makes me think about that book, Everybody Thought We Were Crazy. It's not the same thing you're doing at all, but it has that funny, very LA weirdness.
Everyone did think we were crazy. On that note, my goal is to build a billion dollar brand. I want to build a brand of everyday essentials that everyone can use, and I want to do it the right way. I want to work with farmers directly. I want to change the way body and pantry is sourced and scaled in this country. I don't say that because I want to be an egoist about it. I say that because no one's ever scaled a brand that way. In the early few years, I think we had almost 200 meetings before someone gave us any investment money. People thought it was a cute little hobby out of my kitchen. This is not my hobby. This is a huge business. It's a very serious thing actually.
It's actually one of the reasons why that Martha Stewart interview in the book is my favorite one. She talks about how nobody thought her business would be a success, and nobody thought she could take that idea public, and nobody thought she could make a billion dollars. She became a billionaire from her kitchen. It was the ultimate, "I told you so."
The roster of people you interviewed would make for a pretty incredible dream dinner party. Dead or alive, who else would you invite?
Oh, what a good question. I'd like to meet Walt Disney. I think Anita Roddick from Body Shop is one of my heroes. These people who build worlds, their own version of worlds and live in them and guard them ferociously. Yves St Laurent. I think about him living in Marrakesh. I'd love to sit down with the founder of Patagonia. I've never met him, but he's always been a role model of mine. It's so tempting to talk about famous people. As I mentioned, my interview with Gonzalo, is probably the smartest, wisest interview. I spent my whole career working in fashion and entertainment. I got to work with all the people I dreamed of working with, all the celebrities I wanted to work with. And I always thought they were the most amazing people in the world. Now that I've met this network of people who are growing, and making, and harvesting stuff, I really think they are the most creative people in the world. They're the most needed.
One last existential question for you. It's the one that you were talking about with Jane Goodall. Do you think you were born with the mission?
I think we all are, and she said that as well. And I think the job for us, all of us, is to think about what that is. The other thing I've come to understand, from this book especially, is that the small things are the big things. Even if it's having a small garden or thinking about where you buy your milk or who you spend your money with, the small things collectively become huge things. This idea of purpose and mission, it's so heavy, and it feels so stressful. Maybe what Jane's trying to say when she says, "We all have a mission," is that we all need to stop scrolling and start thinking about how we're treating the people in front of us and the world around us. That is really important, especially with what's going on politically and socially.
All photos excerpted from Flamingo Estate: The Guide to Becoming Alive by Richard Christiansen, © 2024. Published by Chronicle Books.
Follow House Beautiful on Instagram and TikTok.
You Might Also Like
