Flamingo Estate

Richard Christiansen has made himself a new life with a line of products and a cookbook, bearing the name of his stunning LA estate.

Richard Christiansen and his dog at Flamingo Estate.

Covid-19 was all about the pivot, then Richard Christiansen is the pivot master. The Australian-born, Los Angeles-based advertising executive, who started his own agency, Chandelier, in 2005, managed to ditch his old life, start a new business, exceed his revenue expectations, and in the process become happier and more fulfilled in his work.

Before Covid, Flamingo Estate, a 2.8ha property in Eagle Rock in northeast Los Angeles, was just Christiansen’s home, albeit one he opens to an array of creative guests who share his vision – including for a British Vogue cover shoot with Margot Robbie earlier this year. The house has an extensive garden, and during the first week of lockdown in LA a horticulturist told him about local farmers who were supplying hotels and restaurants and had lost most of their business due to the lockdown, and that produce was just rotting on the ground.

Christiansen owns a bookstore, Owl Bureau, in nearby Highland Park, so he decided to sell boxes of farm vegetables from the carpark under the Flamingo Estate name. He says he expected to sell a couple of dozen boxes, but within a week he’d sold 300.

He now has a network of almost 50 farms he works with and 60 delivery drivers, and has dispatched more than 75,000 vegetable boxes.

Flamingo Estate produce box

Today, the Flamingo Estate brand covers fresh food as well as candles, bath products, shampoo, honey, olive oil and other assorted items. From early next year its range of self-care products will be stocked at Mecca stores in Australia but they are currently available through the Flamingo Estate website.

“I would never have started this brand if it wasn’t for Covid,” Christiansen tells WISH. After almost two decades running his own advertising agency Christiansen gave his employees equity in the business and stepped away from the day-to-day operations. “I had that business for nearly 20 years and I love it, but I spent more time inside the four walls of that office than anywhere else in the world and while I’m super proud of the stuff I did, to be able to jump into something like this has been such a great gift. I would never have found my exit clause had Covid not happened, and I couldn’t be happier about that.”

Flamingo Estate product. Picture: Drew Escriva

Christiansen has also been able to indulge his other passion: books. Flamingo Estate Editions has been launched with a cookbook, Fridays From The Garden, and a series of books by some of his favourite writers and friends such as Jane Goodall, Alice Waters and Michael Pollan.

“My dream is that Flamingo Estate becomes the ultimate resource for inspiration about the natural world,” he says. The cookbook carries a foreword by another Christiansen friend and client, Martha Stewart, and in it she says: “He is a man with rare energy and inquisitiveness – and luckily, the wherewithal and courage to make his dreams, even the wildest ones, come true.”

Flamingo Estate lunch table. Picture: Drew Escriva

In that spirit, when it came to book publishing, Christiansen decided to bypass the usual channel of working with an established publisher and do it on his own. “I was frustrated with how the publishing industry worked,” he says, “and I thought, I don’t need a bunch of guys to tell me how to change my book to suit their demographics. I have the distribution, I know how to market it myself, so why would I want to give someone else half the money? When we told the publishing people we had been speaking to that we were going to do it ourselves, everyone laughed at us, so I just can’t wait to prove them wrong.”

And it won’t stop at book publishing: There’s also a Flamingo television show in the works.