Flamingo Estate's New Pink Moon Rosé is This Summer's Drink of Choice
Australian creative mastermind Richard Christiansen launches a limited edition Californian Rosé from his luxurious haven in LA, Flamingo Estate.
A seven-acre earthly paradise high atop the hills of Los Angeles, Flamingo Estate is the brainchild of Australian creative Richard Christiansen—founder of Chandelier Creative agency and Owl Bureau bookstore—and probably the chicest farm stand in the City of Angels, hidden by a lush orchard and rich gardens. Restored and expanded by Paris-based design-duo Studio KO (also behind the Saint Laurent museum in Morocco and London’s Chiltern Firehouse), the serene flamingo-pink estate "is a place, but also a philosophy,” which offers nourishing botanicals and fresh local produce that celebrate Christiansen’s gusto for a luxurious lifestyle imbued with pleasure, beauty, creativity, and a close connection to the Earth and its makers and growers.
With the new launch of its first-ever wine, Pink Moon Rosé, Flamingo Estate captures another one of the founder's steps towards the everyday celebration of hedonistic values, adding this convivial drink to the ever-growing range of organic and natural products originating from the ground's garden, among which you can find candles, soaps, flowers, tinctures, oils, honey, and more.
The property's winemaker, Kamee Knutson, conceived a rich, fruity wine that captures the refined tartness of the Pacific Coast through a delicate blend of hand-picked and gently pressed Tempranillo, Grenache, and Syrah grapes all grown under the Californian sunlight. Tasting notes of raspberry and guava mix together with layers of savory herbal notes for a delightful crisp finish and taste of one of the land's best vineyards. To top it all off, the Pink Moon Rosé launch is accompanied by a colorful assortment of 25 limited-edition resin ice buckets designed by Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce.
Here, discover what sparked Christiansen’s foray into winemaking, his creative collaboration with Pesce, and how Flamingo Estate has gone from home to fully fledged brand in the span of a pandemic year.
L’OFFICIEL: How has Flamingo Estate evolved since its initial conception?
Richard Christiansen: Originally, it was just my home and garden, and I think the biggest evolution is that we've opened it up to the world during the pandemic in the last year. That first week of lockdown we started selling boxes of vegetables. Now we have 35 drivers and I think we've delivered to 44,000 homes. We have opened up the kitchen as well to so many chefs who have come up to try things and people who were not working during the pandemic. We also started making bath products, bread, sauces, and obviously now wine. Flamingo Estate has become much more of a canvas for lots of people to come and experiment, make things and grow things, which has been really wonderful. It's changed from being just a home to becoming a brand almost accidentally.
L’O: Where did your passion for delivering a lifestyle of beauty and pleasure stem from?
RC: I think it was a combination of things. After working in New York for 20 years and being just exhausted and completely burned out, when I moved to Los Angeles I just wanted to reconnect again with pleasure and the senses, nature and living. I was so out of alignment that I think I started to open the door to the idea of living well and feeling healthy. I left New York searching for something more meaningful and joyful, but then also discovering how much beauty and joy there was in nature if we can just do it ourselves.
L’O: What’s the inspiration behind your newly launched Pink Moon Rosé?
RC: The pandemic was about basic human needs, it was about music and sex and laughter and cooking for people, so launching our Pink Moon Rosé just felt like a natural extension of that. The one thing I also love to do is just come home at night and have a glass of wine.
L’O: You also created limited edition ice buckets designed by Gaetano Pesce to accompany the launch, what sparked this creative collaboration?
RC: Gaetano Pesce is obviously a huge icon. He was on my mood board and in my wildest dreams I thought, wouldn’t it be great if he designed an ice bucket for our rosé? Then, through a couple of coincidences, someone I used to work with was working with him on a book and I ended up meeting him. Talk about manifesting what you want! He’s so Italian. He loves food and family and wine and olive oil and living well. Apart from just being an amazing designer, he really understands the basics of eating and drinking and cooking like many Italians. He really understood what I was doing and as soon as we started speaking, I knew straightaway he was going to be perfect.
The pandemic was about basic human needs, it was about music and sex and laughter and cooking for people, so launching our Pink Moon Rosé just felt like a natural extension of that.
L’O: What is your proudest achievement at Flamingo Estate?
RC: I think the fact that we've been able to turn this thing that legitimately brings me pleasure into a business. Because we started working with farmers and growers, whose businesses dried up during COVID-19 because they were just working with restaurants or hotels and maybe the farmers market, we were able to give many of them a new revenue stream they didn't have before. We have saved a few farms from going bankrupt because we were able to work with them to keep their stuff. My goal for Flamingo Estate is to continue that and I say to the team that I'd like to become the Farfetch of the green world, in the sense that we unite all these growers and all these makers and we give them a third revenue stream outside wholesale and outside the markets. That's probably been one of the most rewarding things that we've done.
L’O: What can we expect from Flamingo Estate in the near future?
RC: We've got so much more coming up and there’s a lot going on. This year we fully built our apothecary, we built our pantry in a very big way, and we'll extend our fresh produce deliveries to New York. We are also about to do national distribution of all our products in Australia, my homeland, which is very exciting. We kick off in two weeks a Flamingo After Dark, which is a music series which will have as first guests Moses Sumney and Este from the band Haim. So we have a live concert with them in two Fridays time, and then we will repeat that on every Pink Moon that we have. A book is on the way too. We are just working hard on all cylinders.
