Richard Christiansen’s Los Angeles home Flamingo Estate
Converting a former den of erotic pursuits into a dream home was no easy task.
After a decade of working virtually 24/7 in the New York advertising agency he founded in 2005, Richard Christiansen knew something in his life wasn’t right. And, he confides with a characteristically theatrical flourish, the realisation that he needed to make some changes came to him while he was climbing Mount Everest.
“When we hit the checkpoints where there was reception, the guys I was with on that trip would be inundated with messages from girlfriends, wives or friends, and I didn’t get a message from anyone,” he says.
“And I wasn’t like, ‘oh poor me’ — it just struck me that I know so many people, but I don’t have a friendship deep enough for someone to miss me when I’m away. I came back from that trip and I knew I needed to completely change how I live my life. I needed to fall in love, I needed to find some best friends, I needed to come back and build some bridges.”
It was a friend and collaborator, primatologist Jane Goodall, who would ultimately convince the Australian-born Christiansen to uproot his life in New York. “I was so tired of what I was doing, and she was the one who said, ‘You need to start following the things that you love and find your jungle’, like she found her jungle. And that for me was getting back in touch with creative people again.”
Christiansen did find a jungle of sorts — a 2.8ha property in Eagle Rock in northeast Los Angeles with a dilapidated house on a steeply sloping site and a large and unkempt garden.
He first spotted the property when visiting a friend across the road while working on an advertising shoot in LA.
In 2013 he finally bought the estate, but it came with a caveat from its elderly owner, who had lived in the flamingo-pink house since it was built in the 1940s: he would sell the property, but Christiansen had to take the contents of the house as well.
Amazingly, Christiansen bought the house without ever stepping inside — his meetings with the owner were held in the garden — and what he stumbled on when he took possession was, among other things, a collection of thousands of film reels of pornography.
For a period of time, from the 1950s through to the 1980s the house, as Christiansen soon discovered, had also been the headquarters of a successful erotic film company.
“That’s the bit that’s easy to joke about, but it was much more than that,” he says.
After researching the history of the house and its owners, he discovered it had been something of a retreat for artists as well as photographers.
At one point it had also been the home of a pirate radio station and a magazine publishing house. “It was a place of parties and dinners and creative expression,” he says. “It just seemed like this place was a hedonistic playground for creative people.”
The serendipitous discovery of the estate’s history and Christiansen’s desire to be more connected with creative people dovetailed with a disruption to the industry in which he had been so successful.
“At the same time as I found the house the advertising industry was starting to crumble and the way that we used to make money just dried up,” he says. “Agencies were getting very cutthroat with each other and I was carrying 60 people on my shoulders, and to keep that machine running when I was running on empty was just very tough.” He is quick to point out that despite his feelings of burnout he is immensely proud of building up his agency, Chandelier Creative, and that what he really wanted to do was re-energise the business.
Christiansen grew up in Duranbah in northern NSW, and after stints in the UK, Italy and Sweden working in magazines he eventually landed in New York. In 2005 he launched his own agency because “magazine people know how to tell stories, whether visually or with words”, he says. His clients have included the Hong Kong-based department store Lane Crawford, New York’s Bergdorf Goodman, Old Navy, Sephora, Lululemon, Cartier and Barack Obama.
But after almost a decade in the advertising business, he found things started to change. “I saw publishers becoming agencies and I thought, why can’t we do the reverse?” he says. “And with this team of 60 creative people, how do we become more than just the downstream polishing-up house for products? And so that got me seriously thinking that we need to refocus and pivot to Los Angeles, because this city is the beginning of the world’s imagination. This is where the studios are, and this is where fantasy is made and where make believe happens.”
The idea was to use Flamingo Estate, as Christiansen named the property due to the colour of its main dwelling, to connect with a range of creative professionals in Los Angeles. But first new life needed to be breathed back into the house. To do that, he turned to the Paris-based architectural firm Studio KO, which he came across through a mutual client — André Balazs, the hotelier behind the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, Chiltern Firehouse in London and the Mercer in New York.
The directors of Studio KO, Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier, spend a lot of their time in Morocco, where they have an office and have designed several private houses as well as the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakesh, and there is a definite Moroccan influence in their design for Flamingo Estate.
Studio KO left the shell of the Spanish Colonial-style house largely intact. They restored the pink stucco walls, and placed a new roof of yellow, green and burgundy tiles from Morocco on the building. A wall of arched windows allows sunlight to flood the main living room, which is painted in various shades of light green to meld the interior with the lush garden outside — and taking centre stage is a brightly coloured folding screen, Caribbean Tea Time, from 1987, by the artist David Hockney. Christiansen is a fan of the Australian artist Ken Done and there are several of his playful paintings throughout the house. Venetian terrazzo floors of varying colours have been used throughout and the interior is thoughtfully colourful and chic without being over the top. A few dramatic surprises have been thrown in for good measure.
A guest bedroom, also known as the Blue Room for its intensely coloured walls, was effectively designed around an Andy Warhol portrait of Jane Fonda. “I was with Olivier and Karl when we saw this painting of Jane Fonda and they said, ‘Why don’t you buy it and we’ll match the wall colour to it?’” says Christiansen. The Majorelle blue paint was actually purchased in lots of small tins from the gift shop at the Marjorelle Garden in Marrakesh. The room also features a leopard print covered day bed and has a mirrored ceiling. A Brutalist grey concrete cave serves as the house’s ground floor entrance, which winds guests around a staircase — once a cinema with carpeted stadium seating — and deposits them Narnia-like in the richly decorated main living area.
The project, which took three years to complete, also included new structures built on the property. A large, rectangular home office building with a vaulted ceiling and opening up entirely on one side to the garden has been clad in glazed green tiles from Morocco. The new building also doubles as an entertaining space and, says Christiansen, when clients come to visit and spend the day there the environment creates “a whole different way of working together”.
One of the most striking and unusual features of the property is also one of the most personal for its owner. When WISH first profiled Christiansen in 2010, the portrait that accompanied the story was shot while he was in the bath — a place he said at the time where he likes to work and where he gets some of his best ideas. Christiansen was adamant that the one thing Studio KO include in their design was a special place for bathing. The 39sq m concrete structure has a large concrete tub with a view towards the sunrise, a fireplace and a steam room. The blue of the large stained-glass casement windows was inspired by the colour of the Balearic Sea. Twice a day, for an hour at a time, Christiansen can be found deep in his bath.
Flamingo Estate also employs two full-time gardeners who have been working on regenerating the site. Today the property supports all manner of fruit and vegetables, including papayas, zucchini, strawberries, pomegranates, peaches, plums, olives, figs, apricots and macadamia nuts. Christiansen worked with the French landscape designer Arnaud Casaus and a local horticulturist, Jeffrey Hutchison, to cultivate the garden, planting more than 150 species of flowers and shrubs, many of which are Californian natives. Australian native plants have also been widely used and were sourced from a specialist nursery in the Ojai Valley run by Jo O’Connell.
As to whether the shift in coasts and the completion of his dream house have re-energised Christiansen, it seems you can take the boy out of New York but … “I’m happier here,” he says, “but I get really anxious because I’m used to being so busy. But I feel the gold rush here [in Los Angeles], and I’ve said many times that Walt Disney is my hero and I love his idea when he said, ‘I’m going to build a world that I love’. What I want to do now is to create change, to keep doing creative things and to build a big creative family here.”
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