The guy who made Oprah’s favourite tomato candle has big plans for hand-crafted luxury | Canada Voices

With his tidy beard, bespoke suit, knit tie and Rolex Oyster Datejust, Richard Christiansen looks like a business professional – until you scan down to his feet. Those are clad in a beat-up pair of Red Wing boots, a brand that is popular with construction workers and loggers that require sturdy, protective footwear. “I rarely take them off,” Christiansen says, though he did switch into a pair of brown oxfords for a cocktail party in his honour at Holt Renfrew’s Bloor St. store in May. “I wear them every day in the garden.”

The garden is Flamingo Estate, both his home in the Los Angeles hills and his luxe lifestyle brand of olive oil, candles and other comestibles. Products are made from ingredients sourced from around 150 farms, many of which are in California. Salt for a peppermint exfoliating soap comes from cliffs at Big Sur. Strawberries in a dehydrated fruit snack are grown at Harry’s Berries in Oxnard (“the best strawberry farm in America,” Christiansen touts). Olive oil is crafted by a fourth-generation farmer in Ojai who says he prays before and after crushing the fruit.

It’s the oil Martha Stewart, one of a long list of Flamingo Estate’s bold faced celebrity boosters and a longtime friend who wrote the forward to Christiansen’s first book, uses in her home kitchen. His first viral hit, a tomato candle, is an Oprah favourite. He’s made honey with Lebron James, Ai Weiwei and Julianne Moore by bringing his hives into their gardens. All the revenue from the celebrity collaborations goes to a range of charities. The philanthropic tally from Pamela Anderson’s pickles alone is close to US$500,000, he proudly declares.

But the allure of Flamingo Estate isn’t goodwill, Christiansen feels. It’s the high quality and handcrafting of his products, something he came to appreciate when working for advertising clients such as Hermès, Cartier and Tod’s. Christiansen is also the founder of Chandelier Creative, a successful ad agency in New York, Paris and Los Angeles. When COVID struck, that business took a major hit and he hunkered down at his seven-acre California property, which had previously been a goat farm, artist commune, and adult film studio.

During lockdown, he heard about a woman who was going to lose her own farm because the restaurants and hotels she supplied were closed. Christiansen’s parents were farmers back in Australia, and he related to her plight. He offered to help her sell her vegetables out of a bookstore he owned in L.A. Much to the surprise of both, they were overwhelmed with customers.

Christiansen and his fiancé, Flamingo Estate creative director Aaron Harvey, also began fielding requests from farmers to find other uses for their produce so they developed candles and soaps. Using food grade raw ingredients resulted in a luxury price point (a single wick votive is $96 at Holt Renfrew), but also a superior sensory experience that influential customers like John Legend, Chrissy Teigen and the Kardashians touted to their fans. “No one had taken farming and made it beautiful, treating a tomato like a piece of jewelry,” Christiansen says.

Others have followed, though, including another California resident, the Duchess of Sussex, who is attempting to get her honey, jams and candles off the ground. “I hope everyone who tries succeeds,” Christiansen graciously remarks. “Farmers and the green world are what I care most about.” He loves that he can guarantee growers the one thing he they need most: consistency. “I can say to the sage farmer, ‘We will buy everything you have for this many years out and I will never ask you to take less than the negotiated rate.’”

In addition to Holt Renfrew in Canada, the Flamingo Estate brand is sold across the U.S, Australia and Japan. So are his books, with a third, Pleasure Principles, coming this fall. “I feel like there’s this deep wisdom from the garden that we don’t think or talk about a lot,” he says. “That’s what I really wanted to get into.” His first book, Fridays from the Garden, features recipes that were included with the vegetable boxes delivered at the end of every week during the pandemic. The Guide to Becoming Alive, published in 2024, has advice on happiness and purpose from friends such as the late conservationist Jane Goodall and chef Alice Waters.

Expanding into beauty with a lip balm, sunscreen and face cream is what Christiansen would like to tackle next. In the meantime, he is developing a fragrance, due out next year, with Jean-Claude Ellena, the former in-house perfumer for Hermès. “I want it to smell like California,” he says, sharing that Ellena told Christiansen that he and his partner are “sexy hippies.”

“Sophisticated hippies” works as a descriptor, too. “We just make stuff the way my grandma would make it,” Christiansen says, shrugging nonchalantly. “And maybe that’s the most radical thing to do in a world that’s gone mad for AI and the fast way to get things done.”