Los Angeles, California · Est. 2020 · Founded by Richard Christiansen
Richard Christiansen grew up on a honey farm in rural Australia, spent 16 years running one of New York's most prominent creative agencies, and then -- during the first weeks of the pandemic -- walked away from it all. From a pink hilltop villa in Los Angeles that he'd bought without seeing inside first, he started selling produce from local farmers who were losing their livelihoods. That was 2020. Flamingo Estate is what grew from those first 300 vegetable boxes.
Richard Christiansen bought the house on a dare. He'd been visiting an eccentric older man on a seven-acre hilltop property in Los Angeles for years, placing beehives in his garden and watching the land slowly come alive. One day he told the man -- who was in his 90s and couldn't climb the hill anymore -- that he should sell it to someone who would restore it. The man said: only if you promise to do it yourself, and you can't see inside before you buy. Christiansen, who hated Los Angeles and didn't own a car, said yes.
That house -- a pink, sprawling estate with an orchard, a storied past as a porn studio, a political activist center, and a community radio station -- became Flamingo Estate. In March 2020, burned out from 16 years of luxury marketing in New York, Christiansen moved in. He heard about a farmer who was about to lose her property because every restaurant she supplied had just closed. He started selling her produce on Friday mornings under the name of his house. He expected to sell a dozen boxes. He sold 300. Then 600. Within months he had 50 drivers, a warehouse, and 150 products made with ingredients harvested from regenerative farms across Southern California -- olive oil from 150-year-old trees, honey from his own bees, salt from Big Sur, soaps made with food-grade botanicals.
Flamingo Estate is now carried at Bergdorf Goodman, Anthropologie, and Nordstrom. Christiansen published a 600-page book called The Guide to Becoming Alive, with interviews featuring Jane Goodall, Alice Waters, Martha Stewart, and John Legend. The brand's philosophy is simple and radical at once: a hot bath and a good meal is the best medicine for everything. On a registry, Flamingo Estate is the gift that smells like a garden and feels like a promise to slow down.
