‘Chrissy walks in with John Legend…’: Why LA’s in love with a former Aussie farm boy

This story is part of the June 18 edition of Good Weekend.See all 20 stories.

“What is this filth?” says my partner, brandishing a tabloid-sized catalogue that has arrived in the mail. “It’s got a lot of naked people in it!” That’s from Flamingo Estate, I patiently explain. They make that rosemary candle we like. On the cover is a giant tongue with what looks like an acid tab on the tip. A natural high, it promises. Inside, attractive people in strategically placed soap suds shower in orange groves.

Flamingo Estate is a California-based bath and body brand and its quarterly catalogue inevitably provokes strong reactions, including on the internet. “Literally begging someone to put me on this mailing list,” reads one tweet. The founder is Australian-born former advertising executive Richard Christiansen, a surprisingly mild-mannered man who lives and works on a three-hectare urban farm in north-eastern Los Angeles.

A few years back, together with his horticulturist Jeff Hutchison, Christiansen made a bar of soap using distilled black sage from the backyard. They threw in some home-grown cannabis as well, “probably more than we were meant to”, Christiansen admits, and olive oil.

Christiansen started using the black sage soap in what he calls his “bathing cathedral”: a three-storey stand-alone concrete cube on the highest point of the property. It features a fireplace, stained-glass windows “the colour of the Balearic Sea” and a tub oriented to sunrise. Looking out on a small valley, it also takes in the soaring lines of what was once American aviator Amelia Earhart’s house.

Christiansen in the “bathing cathedral”: a three-storey bathhouse, complete with fireplace. Credit: Christian Högstedt

Unlike the very trendy and expensive soap Christiansen had been using, he says the run-off from this soap didn’t kill his roses. Nor, for that matter, the 149 other species of vegetation in his lush garden, including agave, rhododendron, frangipani, eucalypt and at least half a dozen types of basil.

Christiansen started to think about building his own brand. This was not surprising, since he had 20 years of experience in advertising, designing campaigns for companies from Old Navy to Hermès. Plus, ever since growing up on a sugar-cane farm in regional NSW, Christiansen had maintained that gardening, as an industry, needed disrupting. Why did fertiliser have to be sold in “big, ugly bags”? Why couldn’t soil be sold in an environmentally responsible way that was also beautiful? At one point he’d even gone to meet with executives at the agriculture multinational Monsanto about his idea for a chic gardening line, but they laughed him out of their big glass conference room.

So Christiansen decided that he would do it on his own, and that he would begin with a collection of soaps “from the garden”. From his garden. There was a candle that smelled like his Roma tomatoes. Chamomile hand soap. Lavender shampoo. California health regulations soon dictated manufacturing move off-site, which it did, to a factory in downtown Los Angeles, but the ethos – products inspired by Christiansen’s green thumb – remained.

Oprah named the brand’s $180 “Three Sisters” candle set one of her Favourite Things, and the Flamingo Estate website almost crashed because 2500 of them were selling every hour.

This was around March, 2020. Twelve months later, while the rest of the world was still hibernating, Flamingo Estate had sold almost $10 million worth of self-care products. Last Christmas, Oprah named the brand’s $180 “Three Sisters” candle set one of her Favourite Things, and the Flamingo Estate website almost crashed because 2500 of them were selling every hour. Now the line Christiansen started on a whim is more lucrative than the highly successful creative agency he opened in New York City two decades ago.

How did a boy from regional NSW rise to the top of a crowded marketplace so quickly? Sex sells, sure, but it can’t be all down to the catalogue. The 45-year-old is preparing for a series-A funding round, which involves bringing in cash from outside investors to grow the business in exchange for equity.

Christiansen’s garden – and a key source of inspiration.Credit: Christian Högstedt

Christiansen’s pitch is that Flamingo Estate is about way more than smelling nice. Eventually, he does want to sell fertiliser and soil. Some of the other products he’s got planned aren’t even legal yet. In the meantime, Flamingo Estate’s “status hand wash” – as seen in the bathrooms of some of California’s trendiest restaurants, with plans to target cosmetic surgeons in Beverly Hills next – has garnered comparisons to another company founded by an Australian, Aesop, which first identified a market for highly designed, resolutely unisex grooming products.

“LVMH is going to buy us one day,” Christiansen says, referring to the French luxury conglomerate which owns many of the world’s fanciest designer brands, from Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Givenchy to Moët, Dom Pérignon and Veuve Clicquot. Then the onetime NYC ad man comes out with a line of which Don Draper himself would be proud: “What is Mother Nature if not the last great luxury house?”

Before Flamingo Estate was a bath and body behemoth, it was the name of Richard Christiansen’s home. He bought it in 2013, after its mysterious owner showed him around the rundown grounds in a red silk bathrobe and a leopard print G-string. “It was really a tear-down, like Grey Gardens, but as soon as I saw it I said, ‘Oh, my god, I’m going to buy that,’ ” Christiansen told Architectural Digest of the little pink house on a hill. He subsequently discovered it was used as a film studio for erotica from the 1950s to the ’80s.

Christiansen tells me he moved from New York to Los Angeles because he “wanted to feel sexy again” – and to that I’d say, mission accomplished.

The living room at Flamingo Estate, featuring a David Hockney four-panel screen to the right. Credit: Christian Högstedt

We’re lounging on his sunflower-lined terrace on a Monday morning in May, nibbling on dried strawberries and gazing on the Babylon below. The strawberries, which retail for $113 a jar on the Flamingo Estate website, are currently its bestselling product. Should you order them, they will come, as all Flamingo Estate orders do, in a cardboard box emblazoned with the words WE ARE A HOME FOR RADICAL PLEASURE. This seems true both of the company and Christiansen himself.

The catalogue is the brainchild of Christiansen’s partner, Aaron Harvey. Harvey has spun a vague idea about gardens, traditionally the domain of Prince Charles and Laura Ashley, into edgy, social-media gold. His day job is creative director of a company which makes and manages Lil Miquela, a virtual influencer in Princess Leia buns who “sits” front-row at fashion shows in Paris and boasts 3.6 million followers on TikTok. Harvey is solicitous but has more of an edge than Christiansen, who is a soft-spoken dreamer prone to meandering down conversational paths he later regretfully deems “TMI” (aka “too much information”).

Christiansen’s overshare reflex is on display when Harvey joins us on the terrace and Christiansen starts telling the origin story of their relationship, even though Harvey says it’s “not relevant”. They met on a dating app in early 2020 and got along, Christiansen says, but the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns kept them apart. As the virus spread around the world, Christiansen’s advertising business began to bleed clients. Not knowing what else to do, he ramped up his soap and candle experiments. He also wanted to stay top of his socially distanced new boyfriend’s mind, so he hired a plane with an aerial banner to fly by Harvey’s house. It read: “HARVEY, YES, MUFFIN.” (The “muffin” bit was an in-joke.)

Harvey was charmed. To me, the plane is an example of Christiansen’s talent for creating experiences people want to be a part of. He cites Walt Disney and Martha Stewart as his icons, and both are known for creating worlds interchangeable from their own person. Stewart, an old friend from New York, wrote the foreword to Christiansen’s self-published coffee-table book, Fridays from the Garden. In it, she observes that Christiansen “luckily [has] the wherewithal and courage to make his dreams, even his wildest ones, come true.”

After recovering from a nasty bout of early COVID, Harvey moved into Flamingo Estate. Christiansen shyly showed Harvey the candles he’d been making and had started selling. Harvey thought the packaging, which deploys of-the-moment Millennial pink labels on green glass, needed work.

Christiansen in the Flamingo Estate garden: “What is Mother Nature if not the last great luxury house?”Credit: Christian Högstedt

“Some people are sensitive to different things,” shrugs Harvey. “Mine is that I’m very visual. And the first thing I said was, ‘The spacing is off. The words are not centred on the label.’ ” Christiansen rolls his eyes. “It was so small, you could not tell.” Harvey is undeterred. “I was like, ‘Do you want to just send me the file? I can just fix it for you.’ And then Richard goes, ‘Actually, we’re working on a soap, too. I don’t know if it’s going to be a thing.’ ”

Harvey now guides the look and feel of Flamingo Estate. A huge part of its brand identity is shaped on Instagram, which remains the top referral method for customers. Certainly, Christiansen’s home is endlessly photogenic. But Flamingo Estate also accrued buzz on Instagram because of the vegetables.

When COVID saw restaurants shut down all over LA, Christiansen heard from a few local farmers that they had nowhere to sell their wares. His parents had almost lost their property when he was a kid, and he harbours an affinity for farmers. He suggested the farmers pull together to create vegetable boxes he would affix with the Flamingo Estate label and sell for $138 a pop to home cooks around the city.

During lockdown, the estate’s vegetable boxes were dubbed “nutrition porn for the quarantined”.Credit: Christian Högstedt

Soon boxes were being delivered in their thousands, including to a smattering of bold-faced names like Kris Jenner and LA design icon Kelly Wearstler. “We’ve made lots of effort to make it as photographable as possible,” Christiansen says. “Every Friday, people post their vegetables. During COVID when no one had anything to post on Instagram, that was huge for us.”

The New York Times dubbed the Flamingo Estate vegetable-box phenomenon “nutrition porn for the quarantined”. Today, almost 200,000 vegetable boxes are distributed across LA each week. Christiansen loves that he’s giving farmers a boost – and casting a glow on his burgeoning business at the same time.

One early adopter of the vegetable boxes was cookbook author, model and social-media star Chrissy Teigen. Christiansen didn’t know Teigen when she sent him a direct message on Instagram in August of 2020, except in the same way her other 38 million followers do. “Can John and I come over on Friday for dinner?” Teigen wrote. (John is John Legend, her pop-star husband.)

Christiansen and Harvey recall that in preparation for the arrival of Hollywood royalty, they cleaned the house with “a toothbrush”. Then, Christiansen says, “Chrissy walks in with John, the kids and her mum, sits on the sofa and says, ‘Where are the tables?’ I was like, ‘What tables?’ She’s like, ‘Isn’t this a restaurant?’. I was like, ‘No, it’s my home. There’s my bed. There’s a kitchen. It’s a one-bedroom house.’ ”

“I was like, ‘What tables?’ She’s like, ‘Isn’t this a restaurant?’. I was like, ‘No, it’s my home. There’s my bed. There’s a kitchen. It’s a one-bedroom house.’ ”

John Legend playing the piano in Christiansen’s music room. Credit: @flamingo_estate/Instagram

By all accounts, Teigen and Legend had a great time at dinner. On the Flamingo Estate Instagram page, you can see Legend playing the piano in Christiansen’s music room. After a couple more dinners, Teigen and Christiansen collaborated on three Flamingo Estate jams inspired by Teigen’s Thai heritage. Earlier this year, Christiansen hit another pop-culture milestone: he told the story of the time Chrissy Teigen mistook his house for a restaurant on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show.

---

Flamingo Estate has become, for those in the know, a byword for barefoot glamour. Architecture magazines breathlessly covered the spectacular renovation, spearheaded by French design duo Studio KO. It was only a matter of time before the fashion world discovered it: Quentin Tarantino and Margot Robbie have been shot at Flamingo Estate for British GQ and American Vogue, respectively.

Billie Eilish dropped by at one point for a chat with the BBC by the pool. The weekend before I visited, Christiansen threw a baby shower for the enigmatic founder of billion-dollar beauty brand Glossier, Emily Weiss, on the terrace.

Billie Eilish being interviewed at the property, which is often used as a stylish backdrop for media interviews.Credit: @flamingo_estate/Instagram

You know about the strawberries already, but there are lots of other new Flamingo Estate products I could tell you about. Christiansen no longer limits himself to sourcing ingredient ideas from his own garden, nor does he stick to the shower. He looks instead to partner with organic farmers from all over the world on a broad range of products.

There’s a San Luis Obispo rosé, Pink Moon, which I have personally observed guests at the iconic Sunset Tower Hotel in LA quaff like water. Hutchison the horticulturist, who works among roaming chickens in a goat shed at the bottom of the garden, is excited about a forthcoming single-origin Earl Grey using tea leaves from a woman-owned farm in Japan’s Shizuoka prefecture. Christiansen has even reeled in his dad, who sends over perfectly imperfect batches of manuka honey from his farm in Forbes, in central-west NSW.

The Flamingo empire is real, but when I use its wild clary sage, blue eucalyptus and St John’s wort shower gel in the morning, am I really “healing from the garden”? Do I believe the St John’s wort will “calm the mind” and “reduce fatigue” like the bottle promises? More likely, I’m drawn to using it because the sensory experience transports me to one of Christiansen’s sunset cocktail parties, the kind I’ve seen on his Instagram. The guests are swathed in silk, the path lined with tea-lights, and is that John Legend’s All of Me arriving on an impossibly fragrant, blue-eucalypt breeze?

“A red lipstick is a red lipstick unless there is a wonderful story to be told that takes you beyond it.”

Mecca creative director Marita Burke says successful beauty brands “have to be the conduit between product and promise”. That’s why she chose Flamingo Estate to launch at Mecca this month, its first foray into Australia. As Burke notes, “a red lipstick is a red lipstick unless there is a wonderful story to be told that takes you beyond it.”

Christiansen is little-kid-level excited about his range selling at Mecca, clearly seeing it as a homecoming of sorts. So much of the Flamingo Estate allure is entwined with LA, which Christiansen correctly calls “the centre of the world’s imagination”. But having seen the way he speaks about his childhood and the profound influence his parents’ working the land had on his ultimate career path, I wonder if in fact Flamingo Estate is a stopgap for him as he wends his way back home to Australia.

A young Christiansen dressing up as “Superbee” for a food fair to promote the family’s wares.Credit: @flamingo_estate/Instagram

“I couldn’t wait to run away from where I grew up,” Christiansen says of his early years in Duranbah, inland from Cabarita Beach in northern NSW. “But it was actually the most beautiful place to grow up, at the end of a dirt road, with the reddest volcanic soil.”

In many respects, it was a quintessential country Australian childhood. Ther was one schoolhouse for all 24 kids in the town and Christiansen and his identical-twin brother very much “made our own fun”. In other ways, Christiansen felt out of place: he loved Dynasty, Dolly Parton and The World of Interiors magazine, which his mother, a landscaper, ordered from the UK. Sometimes he and his brother, who works in advertising in New York like Christiansen used to, drove to the Gold Coast airport just to watch planes fly away to more interesting places.

“I’ve only recently come back to this idea of standing up for your own pleasure,” Christiansen says. “As kids we had that, in dribs and drabs.” Perhaps there’s a connection to be made between the hot baths Christiansen and his brother would take every night and his hammam on the hill; the flowers his mother would pick for the table and his business built around floral scents. A tradition of Margaret Fulton teas at Christiansen’s grandmother’s house on Sundays has turned into her grandson cooking for Chrissie Teigen in California.

Christiansen in his kitchen: as a child, he had Margaret Fulton-inspired teas at his grandmother’s.Credit: Christian Högstedt

How did you come to essentially recreate your childhood here in LA, I ask. Christiansen hesitates. He knows what he’s about to say might sound a little kooky. It involves magic mushrooms. “I want to tell you about my psilocybin trip last weekend,” he says. “I saw myself as a kid, as a teenager. I saw my mother. I saw myself in my grandmother’s kitchen, her cooking, and I felt this genuine sense of love and warmth.”

The vision was wonderful, he says, but it was also “fragile and temporary”. Christiansen’s lesson was that he had to keep going, keep working: “‘If you’re going to leave home, you’ve got to make it worth it.’” I want to do something with my two hands that my mum and dad would be proud of.” (He adds that his mum will call and say, “Oh, I think you should put chokos in your vegetable boxes.” )

Christiansen with his mum.Credit: Courtesy of Richard Christiansen

Experiences like this are why Christiansen is determined that Flamingo Estate pioneers the use of adaptogens – mushrooms, herbs and roots that are believed to help the body deal with stress but are largely unregulated – in consumer goods. Laws are changing, he says, and “I want to make absolutely sure we’re ready for it.” Currently, plant-based supplements of this sort which claim to reduce anxiety, for instance, or improve libido, are available in the US, but their claims are not verified by the Food and Drug Administration.

Trials currently underway could boost their legitimacy, and in the same way that the commercial marijuana business has exploded in the US over the past decade, Christiansen hopes he could be one of the first to take advantage of a growing interest in adaptogens.

Today, though, preparations are underway for the next catalogue, which is shooting this afternoon by the pool. Harvey needs Christiansen on set. In the living room, on the way out, we pass by a model in an oversized white shirt and bikini bottoms having her hair styled next to a David Hockney four-panel screen. Christiansen walks me to the succulent-adorned gate which will take me out of his secret garden and back into the hubbub of LA. Before I go, he wants to impart a message.

“More than anything, I wish for your kids, and everyone’s, the ability to live life in chapters,” he says. “One chapter of my life, the creative agency in New York, ended. And then I got this magical, serendipitous thing. But the next chapter has to be a big farm in Australia. It has to be.”

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

The best of Good Weekend delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Sign up here.