Radical pleasure: a new guide for living from Flamingo Estate in Los Angeles
For Flamingo Estate founder Richard Christiansen, who grew up on a NSW farm, ceremony and pleasure are essentials for a life well lived. The expatriate’s new book shows how we can learn these too.
Richard Christiansen has changed his life in many ways. Not least because radical pleasure – the pursuit and appreciation of it – is a guiding principle at Flamingo Estate. Set high in the hills of Los Angeles and surrounded by abundant orchards and gardens, the pink 1940s Spanish-style house was, first, simply his home.
In its former life it was owned by a pair of rather prolific porn filmmakers who created erotica throughout the 1950s to the ’80s. It’s been the backdrop for photoshoots starring Margot Robbie and Quentin Tarantino. Chrissy Teigen once turned up at the property with her husband, singer John Legend, and children thinking it was a restaurant. The New York Times’ T magazine, one of many, many magazines to photograph it, described Flamingo Estate as “a happy jamboree of global references: a Spanish Revival house laid with Venetian flooring abutting a Persian-inflected bathing tower wrapped in Moroccan tiles, all realised with Tinseltown-worthy gusto”.
Flamingo Estate then became a lifestyle brand. It sells tomato-scented candles and limited-edition honey made in collaboration with everyone from NBA superstar LeBron James to artist Ed Ruscha, Roman parsley and fresh rosemary soaps, and boxes of produce created in collaboration with some 128 farmers.
Christiansen, who left the global creative agency he founded in 2005 to focus on Flamingo Estate, wants to share the lessons all of this change has provided him.
In his new book, Flamingo Estate, The Guide to Becoming Alive, Christiansen, who grew up on a sugar cane farm in northern NSW, details how he started truly living again. It also serves as a reminder to himself of what he wants to hold on to.
“Flamingo was such a selfish project. I just started making the things I needed every day, and just began to get back into my own skin and to stop sleepwalking through life. It started with a good bar of soap in the morning and some good coffee, and I finished it with a candle at night. Just all the things I needed myself,” he tells The Australian over the phone from LA. “The book is sort of an extension of that. I was like, ‘okay, what’s all the information I now need to keep this going?’.”
Broken into chapters with titles such as “Stop and Smell the Sage”, and “Travel Far Like the Dandelion”, the book includes interviews with people Christiansen has collaborated with and long admired. They include the likes of conservationist Jane Goodall, celebrated interior designer Kelly Wearstler, lifestyle maven Martha Stewart, actor and activist Jane Fonda among many more.
Spliced with observations about his garden and its lessons, lush and sensual photographs of Flamingo Estate, its produce and its products, it’s rife with meditations on such things as the importance of ceremony and ritual, of forgiveness and finding purpose and, yes, seeking and protecting radical, life-altering pleasure.
“The term ‘radical pleasure’ is sort of an interesting one … people ask what we mean by that … And it’s radical to me because it takes such discipline to stand up for yourself in terms of policing. It’s so easy to take the shortcut, to microwave the bad food, to purchase a cheap wine, to buy the vegetables that have been flown in from the other side of the world. It’s so easy not to know where the things you buy come from. It’s so easy to take the cheap version of something and not the good one,” Christiansen says.
“And I really know so much about the food system now. I know so much about sourcing and I know so much about people on the ground, in the ground, with their hands in their dirt, growing the things that we need, and we need to treasure those things. We need to treasure those people,” he says.
“The world needs more gardeners and farmers.”
Creating rituals and a sense of ceremony in our lives is something Christiansen sees as essential to true pleasure. In one of the conversations in the book, David Leon from Farmer’s Footprint, a regenerative agriculture movement, speaks of what he believes to be the truly detrimental effect a lack of ceremony can have on ourselves, and our communities.
“We need ceremony,” says Christiansen. “That’s why my mum goes to church. That’s why my grandparents went to lawn bowls. That’s why people have sporting teams. In different ways, as humans we must have ceremony. And for me the most important, easy ceremony is just setting a table for someone.”
“I asked Alice Waters, the chef, in the book, ‘how are we going to solve all the problems we’ve got in the world?’. And she said, ‘just by having a meal with someone’. And I do think the personal is global. I think if we could just treat ourselves better, treat our neighbours better, it means we’ll treat our communities better. It means we’ll treat each other better.”
Ceremony for Christiansen means simple pleasures. Cooking a meal from scratch. Setting a table, always. Long, hot baths.
“Small things that have a really big ripple effect,” he says.
For Christiansen, the interviews he conducted throughout the book were a source of inspiration. All the people he chose to feature operate on what he calls “a “really high vibrational energy”.
“They’re very productive people and they’re really participating. They’re in the driver’s seat of their own lives. Kelly Wearstler is one of the most disciplined people I’ve ever met. I would say the same of (Mecca founder – Mecca stocks Flamingo Estate products) Jo Horgan. I’d say the same of Martha Stewart and all of them. And so I was really interested to (ask), ‘how do I operate on as high vibrational energy as you guys do? I really want more of that. How do I do it?’. And so I really went into them with that intention. I think we all want that.”
So then, how do we? Christiansen thinks it’s about living a life of intention – with what you say yes to, and also, crucially, what you refuse.
“I think it is discipline and practice, and I think it’s small choices, “he says.
“Kelly (Wearstler) talks a lot about (this) … her chapter is called ‘Prune Your Roses’. And it’s this idea that, as you know, you have to cut your roses back really hard for them to come back really strong in the summer. And so if you want your life to flower the same way, you’ve got to take the scissors to it … take the scissors to your life. It was really such a clear thing.”
A life of purpose factors here too. But as Christiansen notes, it doesn’t need to be anything grand.
“Purpose is such a heady thing for a lot of people. Many of us are just trying to get through a day without crying, let alone have a purpose. So this idea is heady, but … your purpose could also (be) just to be a great mum or could be just a great member of your community or plant trees, whatever the thing is, it doesn’t need to be heady.”
For Christiansen, purpose and success sit with him in different ways. “Success for me looks like the ability to delete Instagram and spend time with my dogs. That’s success,” he says. For the business, however, he wants it to be big. He mentions Aesop, the Australian luxury beauty brand recently sold to L’Oreal for $3.7bn. It’s not for avaricious reasons. But he wants to show that a business can be run differently
“I don’t say that because I’m greedy. I say that because there’s never been a brand that’s been able to scale in a really dynamic way, working directly with farmers, sourcing the way we do, not getting ingredients from contract manufacturers or not getting ingredients that have been flown in from the other side of the world. And there’s never been, especially in the personal care and beauty space … a brand that’s been able to source that way,” he says.
“The economy is not engineered for that. And so I’d like to do it so I can show people it can be done so other people could follow in my footsteps and do it too. I think we need a giant sea change in the way we make and source all of the stuff in our bathrooms, in our kitchens.”
There is another important facet to Flamingo Estate, and everything it does too – the capacity for surprise.
“Flamingo as a project has been (about), how do we put culture into horticulture? LeBron James, for example, he doesn’t really have any right to make honey. Neither does Kelly Wearster or Ed Ruscha, the one we just finished this week. … but because it doesn’t make sense, it’s interesting. Which is maybe this thing about surprise,” Christiansen says.
“I think it’s more important than ever to keep surprising your eye. Because now I feel like Instagram has given everyone the ability to know everything about everything about everything. And there is the near familiarity with everything that you see because we’ve already seen it. And so surprise is such a precious and rare commodity.”
Flamingo Estate, The Guide To Becoming Alive, $75, is available now for preorder from flamingoestate.com and will be available from Mecca stores and wherever good books are sold from November 19.
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