A Love Letter to Flamingo Estate: Where Pleasure Becomes Philosophy
Flamingo Estate is the Los Angeles garden sanctuary built by visionary Richard Christiansen — a living experiment in radical pleasure. From intoxicating candles and regenerative olive oils to a cult-favorite subscription box, it proves that beauty, ethics, and sensuality can coexist. It’s not just a brand; it’s a lifestyle manifesto.
Keep reading for the full story — and the pieces we’re loving most right now.
When Pleasure Becomes a Way of Life
It started, as all great crushes do, with obsession.
Not the slow-burn kind — the full-body, heart-racing, who is behind this and how do I live like them? kind.
The first thing that hooked me was the Agrigento Olive Tree Candle. Before I even lit it, the scent filled the room like a secret. Green and mineral, sun-bleached yet impossibly lush. It smells like you’ve stumbled into an Italian garden at golden hour and someone is cooking something divine in the next room. It’s both earthy and elegant, wild and impossibly civilized.
That’s the moment Flamingo Estate got under my skin. The scent was so beautiful it felt illicit — like it had no right to smell that good. And then I learned about the man behind it, Richard Christiansen, and realized the candle was only the doorway.
The Man Who Built Paradise in Los Angeles
Richard is, in a word, audacious.
The kind of person who looks at a crumbling 1940s pink house high in the Los Angeles hills and thinks: let’s build Eden here.
After years of running global creative agencies — the deadlines, the champagne, the exhaustion — he hit the inevitable wall. Burnout turned him back toward the earth. He bought a neglected property once infamous for hedonistic Hollywood parties, and he did the most radical thing possible in a culture addicted to speed: he slowed down.
He planted olive trees, citrus, herbs. He took long baths. He invited bees. He began living as if pleasure were sacred — because to him, it is.
“What’s remarkable about Richard,” someone once said, “is that he treats pleasure as a form of devotion.” It isn’t frivolous. It isn’t indulgent. It’s radical. Every product is a meditation in itself — a candle that asks you to breathe deeply, an olive oil that asks you to taste slowly, a bath ritual that asks you to notice every scent, texture, and nuance.
When the world shut down in 2020, Richard turned his hillside refuge into a living experiment. Farmers who’d lost restaurant contracts brought their produce; he found ways to transform it into products that celebrated the land rather than exploiting it. Tomatoes became candles, sage became soap, olive oil became a kind of holy text.
Today, Flamingo Estate is more than a brand. It’s a philosophy. One where pleasure is serious, beauty is ethical, and the senses are sacred.
A Garden as a Living Character
Flamingo Estate isn’t just in Los Angeles; it feels like an alternate dimension orbiting it.
The pink house sits high in the hills, drenched in sunlight and secreted by dense gardens. The goat shed — a 1930s relic — doubles as an apothecary and workshop. Apothecary jars line the walls, filled with rosemary, mugwort, sage, and other herbs harvested from Richard’s network of 120+ regenerative farms. The bathhouse smells like citrus and basil; light bounces off the walls in fractured rainbows.
And the garden itself — where tomatoes hang heavy on the vine, olives glint silver-green, and bees hum in golden sunlight — is a place of total sensory immersion. It’s not just a place to visit; it’s a place to feel. Every corner hums with care, curiosity, and intention.
Richard calls it “a quest for intimacy — between plants and people, body and spirit, heaven and earth.” And you can feel it in the products, the air, even the light.
Leaving Flamingo Estate, even in imagination, is like stepping out of a dream you don’t want to end.
The Audacity of Living Beautifully
There’s a certain audacity in all this — to declare that pleasure, slow craft, and beauty matter in a world obsessed with speed, efficiency, and synthetic shortcuts.
Flamingo Estate isn’t just a brand; it’s a manifesto for living beautifully in defiance of convenience.
Richard has somehow built a life — and a business — around the belief that joy is serious. That tending the senses can be sacred. That beauty made with integrity is a form of activism.
It’s not escape; it’s presence. It’s an invitation to live with your senses wide open. To slow down, cook something beautiful, light a candle, and let the air around you change.
Richard’s world is proof that when you make beauty your compass — when you refuse to stand for anything less — life itself becomes art.
Inside the Estate: Objects of Obsession
Candles: Scent as Storytelling
The Agrigento Olive Tree Candle is green and mineral and unreasonably sexy — the olfactory equivalent of linen sheets drying in Mediterranean sun. Even unlit, it transforms a space.
Then there’s The Three Brothers Set, a trio inspired by olive trees, citrus groves, and sun-drenched afternoons. These aren’t background scents; they command attention. Each one changes the mood of a room — the way music or sunlight does.
Lighting one isn’t just ambience; it’s atmosphere with a point of view.
Bath & Body: The Garden Made Tangible
Flamingo’s bath line feels like it was harvested at dawn. Rosemary, tomato leaf, lavender, sage — all blended in ways that make you feel clean, not perfumed. There’s a rawness to it, like brushing against a living plant.
The soaps and oils are grounding, herbaceous, sensual. The hand soap leaves a whisper of garden air on your skin. It’s less “self-care Sunday” and more baptism by basil.
Pantry: Edible Poetry
Here’s where Richard’s genius deepens: he doesn’t separate pleasure from nourishment.
Flamingo’s pantry line is pure sensory seduction — olive oil from 150-year-old trees, golden honey from on-site hives, sea salt harvested off Big Sur cliffs. The flavors are elemental. You don’t drizzle this olive oil; you anoint with it.
For locals, there’s the Farm Box, a weekly CSA-style delivery sourced from over 120 regenerative farms around Los Angeles. It’s an act of communion — between soil, sun, and those of us lucky enough to eat what they grow.
The Subscription: Receiving as Ritual
The Seasonal Subscription Box might be Flamingo Estate’s most beautiful invention. Each season, the team curates ten products around a theme or place — always tactile, always storied. You might get a candle from the Estate, a bar of soap from a small grower, honey from a hillside apiary.
Opening one feels like receiving a love letter from the earth.
And for those who, like me, can’t resist the idea of belonging to Richard’s world, there’s the Membership: early releases, samples, and access that feels almost illicit — like being invited behind the gates of Eden itself.
The Art of Living Beautifully
Maybe that’s the real gift of Flamingo Estate: not just candles that smell like paradise, or olive oil that tastes like sunlight, but the reminder that life itself can be curated, savored, and celebrated.
Slowing down, tending the earth, or even just lighting a candle can be revolutionary acts of care.
And maybe, just maybe, each of us can carve out our own corner of the world to live in such a way — to cultivate pleasure, intention, and beauty, and let it bloom in our lives.
That’s exactly what we’re loving right now.
What We’re Loving
Agrigento Olive Tree Candle – green, mineral, intoxicating
The Three Brothers Candle Set – three stories of sunlight and soil
Seasonal Subscription Box – a quarterly ritual of curated pleasure
Membership – insider access to Richard’s world of scent and soil
Affiliate Disclaimer
As always, What We’re Loving Right Now only recommends products we genuinely use, adore, and would gift to our own best friends. Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission — the kind that helps us keep sharing the things we truly love (and never the ones we don’t).