Inside LA’s most aspirational lifestyle brand – and it’s not Goop

You may not have heard of Flamingo Estate but, with the Duchess of Sussex and Oprah among its fans, its influence is outsized

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“Is it true that Kim Kardashian juices your celery?” It’s got to be one of the most absurd questions I’ve ever asked an interviewee – with the added layer of sounding like a euphemism – and Richard Christiansen nearly chokes on his coffee. “She did get some of our celery,” the Australian entrepreneur says with a chuckle.
“Someone gifted her one of our vegetable boxes.” Another chuckle, only this time it’s the joyful gurgle of someone who can’t quite believe his luck. “It’s what I was just saying: I don’t think this brand could have happened anywhere but Los Angeles. There’s a sort of Willy Wonka weirdness to LA, you know?” I do.
“This town’s a bit witchy, a bit crazy, especially with anything health-related. And the amplification that we got simply because we were on the doorstep of Hollywood was…” – he shakes his head, momentarily lost for words – “absolutely incredible.”
“An advertising executive’s dream” would be another way of describing Flamingo Estate’s meteoric rise.
Which is ironic, because when this former advertising executive started his farm-to-table, apothecary-meets-sanctuary lifestyle brand in 2020, he never would have dreamt that Oprah would be including his heirloom tomato candles on her annual “favourite things” list.
That he’d be doing collaborations with basketball star LeBron James, domestic goddess Martha Stewart, actress Julianne Moore and interior designer Kelly Wearstler.
That Jane Goodall would become a fan, alongside Al Gore (Christiansen and his creative director fiancé, Aaron Harvey, are hosting a fundraiser for the environmentalist’s Climate Reality Project next month). At a certain point, whether or not Kim juices your celery is neither here nor there.
We’re sitting in the ‘pleasure garden’ that started it all, in a little outhouse built into the hilltop of Flamingo Estate: the lush, sprawling seven-acre property in Highland Park, LA, that Christiansen bought eight years ago – and restored him from burnt-out workaholic to the New South Wales farm boy he once was.
Just visible beyond the lemon trees is the pink 1940s Spanish-style house (which was once a porn studio – more on this later), and beneath us a trip of goats impatiently awaits the lunch he has in a basket at his feet. Only I keep distracting him with more questions about his celebrity pulling power. Because even La La Land’s Willy Wonka weirdness doesn’t explain how you get LeBron James, Ai Weiwei, Julianne Moore and Will Ferrell to make you honey in their gardens.
That development, a couple of years ago, “came about because of a slightly unhinged celebrity customer”, explains Christiansen, a softly spoken, mild-mannered 48-year-old with the pink cheeks of a schoolboy. “Now this is a very famous person, and he calls and says to me: ‘Can I have a Flamingo Estate? Could you come and make me one?’ I hear myself snort, because of course the uber-famous would do this, even though it’s tantamount to asking someone: ‘Can I have your life? Can you make me one just like it?’”
When a bemused Christiansen asked the man to explain, “He told me that he wanted to teach his kids about farming and getting back to nature, and the intention was great, but I had to explain that I wasn’t a landscaper and that I couldn’t actually give him a garden or a petting zoo,” he goes on.
“But then, when I hung up the phone, I started to think about all the things that I could do for people who genuinely wanted to get involved with the environment. That it might actually be fun to, say, put beehives in people’s gardens…’ And so it was that Ai Weiwei’s honey went up on Flamingo Estate’s website, alongside its Roman parsley soap and persimmon vinegar.
What’s curious about Flamingo Estate’s success here, of all places, is that LA is ordinarily the land of wacky wellness brands like Goop, peddling ‘coffee enema kits’ and ‘psychic vampire repellent sprays’. It’s the natural home of ‘disruptor brands’, there to tell an ever-gullible clientele they’ve been doing it wrong (and that the key to eternal life is actually ethically sourced spider web water, drunk through a sieve).
“[Those] brands really annoy me,” murmurs Christiansen, “especially in this country, where we’ve got, what, 700 different types of water? You think of older generations, who have quietly been doing the sensible thing their whole lives – what must they think?”
Then, in the midst of all this witchery, Christiansen appears with his fruit and vegetable boxes, sourced only from local farms – and boom.
Kelly Wearstler attributes the brand’s “incredible” success to “its authentic fusion of luxury and nature. By offering products that celebrate the pleasures of the natural world, Richard has created a brand that resonates deeply with those seeking genuine, high-quality experiences. He has uncovered a universal desire – the want for products that reconnect us to the natural world no matter where we are. It brings people closer to nature, crafting an experience of sustainable luxury that is as accessible as it is aspirational. Richard’s magic lies in making these values desirable yet grounded, reminding us that luxury can be found in simplicity.”
Now, admittedly the brand took off during Covid, a back-to-basics time when people rediscovered the joys of fresh produce, when they had time to care. Also, the packaging is manna from Instagram heaven, the boxes themselves objets d’art (one LA friend uses them to store her underwear). Then there are the much-criticised price points, which could be seen as wacky in themselves: spicy strawberries are $80 a jar, ‘celebrity honey’ goes up to $250 (by comparison, a jar of Highgrove Royal Estate honey in the UK is £25).
Ed Ruscha honey, $75; Farm box, from $70; Dried spicy strawberries, $80; Vinegar, $32; all flamingoestate.com
But there’s nothing cutting edge about the message Flamingo Estate has put out from day one, the one Christiansen has spelt out over 500 beautiful pages in his forthcoming book, The Guide to Becoming Alive – which includes interviews with the likes of Goodall, Stewart, John Legend and Jane Fonda. Slow down, prioritise pleasure, reconnect with your senses: ‘Live life with your eyes open.’
“I’m always saying to people who want to work for us: ‘Please do not work here if you want innovation,’” says Christiansen, who started working with the first local farm as a favour in March 2020 and now has more than 120 under his belt, with dozens of drivers delivering thousands of farm boxes around Southern California. “Because what we’re doing is the oldest thing in the world: we’re making stuff the old-fashioned way. In a world that’s drunk on innovation, we need to run the other way.”
I tell him I think that people would have been ready to change direction even without Covid, and that he definitely makes a more convincing lifestyle guru than the many actresses and models who have tried their hand at it over the past two decades. “Listen, I’m not a doctor and I’m not a therapist,” he stresses.
“There’s a lot of stuff I’m not. But I do really believe in simple goodness. I think many of those celebrity brands are sort of ‘empty calorie’ brands. There’s a glut of them.”
Are those brands guaranteed a certain popularity purely because of the name behind them, though? “Yes,” he nods. “That and the price point. We get so much criticism about our price point.”
There’s an enlightening chapter by the co-founder of Farmer’s Footprint, David Leon, in the book, and Christiansen tells me how scandalised he was when trying to find investors by the expectation that their margin would be above 90 per cent. “A 90 per cent margin means you have to ship from overseas, and that the farmers will get f—ked. I wasn’t prepared to do that.”
Ask him about the psychological appeal of lifestyle brands in general, and he doesn’t have to think about it. “What people crave right now is certainty,” he says with aplomb. “Take Trump. He’s an asshole and a criminal and a dirt bag, but you know what you’re going to get, and right now, when the world feels uncertain, we want that certainty. Exactly the same is true for [lifestyle brands]. The new version of Goop is all those ‘longevity’ businesses. It’s sort of the same formula, created to provide ‘an answer’ to uncertainty.”
Before we move on, I have to ask about Meghan, which I know will annoy him (and it does). Ever since the Duchess of Sussex announced the imminent launch of her own lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, the media narrative has been that this is a Flamingo Estate rip-off, and poor Christiansen is constantly asked about it.
Has he met her? “Yes, many times.” Is she a friend? “Yes, I think she’s great.” At my insistently raised eyebrow he laughs, shrugs: “Listen, I honestly think she’s wonderful and wish her well. There’s enough sunshine for all the flowers, and I’m just very happy when anyone wants to start a brand that means working with the garden.”
So he doesn’t feel she’s been “overly inspired” by Flamingo Estate, as reports have suggested? “We wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t been inspired by Martha Stewart and Daylesford Organic [which Christiansen loves so much he even called his dog Daylesford]. We’re all standing on each other’s shoulders, and I don’t know, but I hope she was inspired by us.”
This, and my accidental use of the word ‘wellness’ to describe Flamingo Estate, are the only two moments when he tenses up in our two hours together. Because, though the premise of the company and the book is ultimately mental and physical wellness through sensual pleasure, Christiansen isn’t a fan of the word, he tells me. “I much prefer the word “wholeness”.”
‘Wholeness’ was what the son of sugar-cane farmers from the rural town of Duranbah was seeking when he decided to buy the dilapidated Flamingo Estate, after more than a decade of heading the New York-based creative agency Chandelier Creative – known for its work with high-end commercial, fashion and retail brands such as Cartier, Hermès, Khaite and Apple.
Amazingly, he had never seen inside the house when he exchanged. It was one of the 90-year-old seller’s stipulations, and only when Christiansen moved in did he understand why that was. “I found hundreds and thousands of porn films. The house had been a porn studio from the 1950s through the early 1980s. There was an editing room and a cinema, mirrors on the ceilings, and a room of sex toys.”
Although the house and brand’s origin story is an integral part of the book, he’s kept a careful balance. “Of course sex and porn are easy to joke about, but the layer above that is that even beforehand, in the 1940s, this place was a real hedonistic playground, and not just about sex but food, art, all the weirdos too… About deep human pleasure.”
Christiansen had left Australia at 16 and completed a law degree in London, “because that’s what we were all being told to be back then: doctors and lawyers. Now, I feel like parents need to be telling their kids that we need more gardeners, more environmentalists, more people who get their hands in the earth and dirt under their fingernails.”
In London, he worked in the legal department of a record company and a bar in Soho, before being advised to get into advertising “because I was good with people”. A stint working for Benetton in Italy “when Benetton was still hot” and the creative genius Oliviero Toscani was at the helm made Christiansen think he’d found his calling.
“Because Toscani was such a visionary. That brand was doing social media before social media: all the HIV stuff and the race stuff. Think about the cultural landscape now. Are any brands taking those kinds of positions? Not one.” He shakes his head, takes a sip of coffee. “I remember, Oliviero would get so happy if people threw bricks through the window of the shops. ‘Good,’ he’d say. ‘We’ve shaken them.’”
But after moving to New York and starting his own agency in his early 30s, something changed. “That was the beginning of just working and working. I was so hungry for success, and really to run as far away as I could from the farming world. Which is funny, because now I’ve gone full circle – and I’ve never been so happy.”
Even if he had been able to explain his unhappiness back then, Christiansen wouldn’t have felt he was allowed to complain. “Because on all the usual metrics I was doing really well.” But he was lonely. “I didn’t have a good long-term relationship. I dreamed of having kids and getting married, and it just felt like such a distant hope.”
He was out of shape, stressed, exhausted (one year he was JetBlue’s number one flyer) and feeling the weight of his responsibilities towards the dozens of staff he employed in Hong Kong, New York and LA. “And when I closed the door at the end of the day, I’d open up a bottle of wine or three, just to bring my stress levels down.”
Perhaps worst of all, he had got ‘the ick’ about his own industry. “Looking back, I started to fall apart when we were working with these fast fashion brands that were selling $10 jeans. There I was creating all this love and these narratives around something that wasn’t real. We didn’t know what was going on behind the curtain or how these things were being made,” he makes a face, “and I just started to just feel dirty. Yet all that was paying for this massive machine we had built.”
The tipping point came with Covid. “It’s funny how life hears your wishes,” he says, smiling in the direction of the goats, who are trying to remind us that they still haven’t had their lunch, “because when the pandemic happened it all fell apart spectacularly. It was the worst fear of my life – and what a blessing!”
Within weeks of Covid starting, he also met Harvey, who had worked in the luxury market for years and was happy to help out with his boyfriend’s humble pandemic project by designing first the logo and then the boxes. “I said to him: ‘Let’s take all that stuff we learned from Hermès and all those other clients and treat Mother Nature that way.’ Which is exactly what they went on to do.”
When he first started Flamingo Estate, Christiansen was sure he would go back to his old job, his old life. Today, he wouldn’t swap what he has for anything, he tells me. Building the brand may be hard graft, but he’s fiercely defensive about his daily pleasures.
“I feel like I spent the first half of my life always self-medicating in some way, and ricocheting from one thing to another. But when I got to this place, I decided I was going to put a pin in all of that and listen to my body. If I’m hungry I’m going to eat, if I’m thirsty I’m going to drink.”
Every meal is now a ceremony, as is bathtime in the huge concrete bathtub – custom-made to fit his 6ft 3in frame – overlooking the lush hillside. “What I was craving when I moved here was pleasure. I wanted to have sex again. I wanted to feel healthy and joyful again. And I think I did good on my promise to bring all that back.”
Those things, in turn, seem to have given him the energy to build this business, and he has big plans for Flamingo Estate. “My goal is to build a billion-dollar brand – not because I want to be a billionaire, but because I want to prove that you can build a big brand, working with farmers, doing it the right way.”
He’d eventually like there to be a media arm too. “I spoke about not having a role model in terms of the green world as a kid, and although now there’s David Attenborough and there are old ladies gardening, with Attenborough everything’s dying, the ice is melting etc, and it’s a very different energy to what’s going on here. So I’d love to wrap it all up in a big bow for people with green thumbs, you know?”
From where I’m sitting, that’s exactly what Richard Christiansen has already done for his California clients, and although this feels like a natural ending point, I’ve got the nagging feeling I’ve forgotten something. Then Christiansen taps his forehead, groans: “The goats! Come on. Let’s go and give them their lunch.”
The Guide to Becoming Alive, by Richard Christiansen (Chronicle Books, £40), is out on 21 November and is available to pre-order from Telegraph Books
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