There is a very particular kind of perfection in an elegantly stamped brick of soap, especially ones made with hand-picked black pepper from Madagascar, or sustainable Big Sur sea salt, or jasmine from a third-generation Egyptian farm, plucked every morning at dawn.
In fact, the offerings from Californian lifestyle brand Flamingo Estate are so elevated — a range of candles endorsed by the Dalai Lama; a £200 jar of honey from actress Julianne Moore‘s bees — that, at times, it reads like a parody of a shopping list for the world’s top 0.001 per cent.
Put it this way: once you have inspected a drinking chocolate gift set which costs £73, and heirloom tomato scented dish soap costing £23 — a favourite of Oprah Winfrey — you will no longer be impressed by Gwyneth Paltrow‘s ‘luxe’ vision at Goop.
Flamingo Estate makes Goop look so mass market that it might as well be Lidl. And a certain Duchess of Sussex has taken note.
The brand was created by stylist and creative Richard Christiansen in 2020. What began as a pandemic enterprise, in which veg boxes from local farmers were packaged beautifully and sold to his wealthy friends for a fortune, became something far bigger, and more lucrative.
A tiny jar of dried strawberries, dusted with chilli, costs £63. Bags of manure have been sold for £60 a pop. Will Ferrell‘s honey (also for sale at £200) is now sold out and on a waiting list. It also sells in-car fragrance which smells — not of ‘new car’ but of olive oil.
‘It will make your car smell like the warm embrace of a hot farmer,’ promises Christiansen.
The idea is that much of the produce comes from Christiansen’s seven-acre garden, and is made in his enviable Tuscan-style pink palazzo just outside Los Angeles.
Previously owned by a director of pornographic movies, for decades the house had been used as a porn studio.
Now, as Christiansen’s Instagram posts show, the real hotbeds of the house are his fabulous kitchen, where boughs filled with peach blossom sit in the sink, and his garden, from where a bountiful harvest is gathered.
What makes this olive-oil-for-the-Cali-elite enterprise news is that in 2022 the owner was visited numerous times by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
She, of course, has just announced her own lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, which will operate from her own Tuscan-style cream palazzo in Montecito in California. And as we shall see, the indications are that it has numerous areas of coincidence with the Flamingo Estate in terms of style, aspiration, inspiration and even target market.
That she was inspired by this wildly fancy venture seems beyond question. The issue now becomes: is she planning on copying it wholesale?
One observer says that Meghan’s newly launched lifestyle brand ‘looks like what happens when you go to a dinner at Flamingo Estate and aren’t invited back’ and adds that Meghan’s offering is ‘suspiciously derivative’. It’s no surprise to be told that she was utterly enamoured by this vision of uncompromising high-end perfection, presented with unbending elegance.
Or, as the website puts it: ‘Flamingo Estate is a reminder that beauty is not so much the penchant of certain people for exceptional things, as it is their refusal to stand for anything less.’ Words which one can imagine dropping from Meghan’s lips.
Reports reveal that she was so bowled over by the vision that she actually wanted to partner Christiansen and his boyfriend Aaron Harvey in business, as she did for instance with the drinks company Clevr Blends, in which she invested back in December 2020.
Writer Rachel Strugatz, of U.S. entertainment website Puck, said last week: ‘There were multiple in-person meetings with the Flamingo Estate team in 2022, I’m told, and Markle expressed a desire to come on as an ‘active partner’ in the business.’
She added: ‘Apparently, Markle and Prince Harry became such big fans that they displayed Flamingo Estate products in their home .’
This seems to be true beyond dispute. A stack of Flamingo Estate books about gardening and the environment, costing an astonishing £290 for six books, is visible in the background of a 2022 clip of Prince Harry promoting a New Zealand eco-travel project from his study.
Strugatz said that no deal was ever done between Flamingo Estate and Meghan, noting: ‘Ultimately, the estate realised they didn’t want to take the business in that direction.’
She added that a source said: ‘It was a business she was trying to be a part of,’ and said that Meghan had the chance to look through all the relevant financial information which an investor might, giving her ‘intimate knowledge of the business’.
With Flamingo Estate sales doubling each year and the venture now in profit, you might imagine that this would present a very tempting prospect for Meghan, a former actress with an excess of public attention and a well-developed aspirational personal style but a lack of long-term commercial deals.
Her five-year deal with Netflix is expected not to be renewed when it expires in autumn next year, and her Spotify deal was rather rudely yanked last year with executives expressing dismay at the paltry amount of content which she produced in her podcast Archetypes.
Meanwhile, she and husband Prince Harry have to fund their extremely expensive lifestyle, including a reported $2 million (£1.6 million) a year for security.
Harry has his charity work with Invictus, and earns some money via the eco firm Travalyst, but now that they have sold their story in the documentary Harry & Meghan, and Harry has thrown his family under the bus in his book Spare, the question of what they can do next is a pressing one.
Christiansen himself didn’t respond to requests for comment about the Sussex plans last week, and nor did the Sussex’s media office.
Would it be hopelessly vulgar to suggest, though, that he could be a little taken aback by Meghan’s plans, which were unveiled this month? For her lifestyle brand, which has yet to launch, seems to be aiming to occupy a very similar space to his.
Let’s take recipe books, which Meghan’s American Riviera Orchard is seeking to publish online and in book form.
Flamingo Estate has published its Fridays From The Garden cookbook, comprising 150 recipes with a foreword from the Queen of lifestyle, Martha Stewart. It costs £62. The first book published was the Flamingo Estate Cookbook.
Martha Stewart said of Christiansen: ‘He buys a house on the top of the hill overlooking Los Angeles, and he transforms this ex-porn king’s mansion into a veritable paradise of gardens and deep, dark baths and furniture that’s crazy and good.
‘He looks like a young boy with pink cheeks, and he’s generous and thoughtful and busy, yet you never think he’s that busy.’
How about jams and jellies — for which American Riviera Orchard is also seeking trademark?
Here, again, is a central plank of the Flamingo Estate’s offering. Model Chrissy Teigen — reputedly a role model for Meghan — has made three jams with the company, which has a whole section devoted to pantry essentials.
All of their celebrity collaborations are non-profit, and send funds to the good causes nominated by their celebrity partners.
American Riviera Orchard wants to sell nut butters, salsas and spices. Flamingo estate sells chilli oil, olive oil and salsa macha.
Then we come to the gardening forks and trowels. Flamingo Estate sold a range of hand-cast bronze gardening tools, for £2,400 a set. We wait to see what the price point is of Meghan’s garden essentials.
Some things, though, are pure Meghan, such as the calligraphy-inspired logo, and the focus on fancy stationery of all kinds, including guest books and table place-card holders.
But mostly there is a unnerving feeling of synchronicity. Even the suggestion that there might be an American Riviera Orchard shop is very Flamingo Estate — it had a successful pop-up in the Hamptons over the summer.
Perhaps the biggest clue is the word ‘Orchard’. Meghan — a city girl who grew up in LA and worked in Toronto — has not up to now been much noted for her love of the natural world.
But her new website is, by name at least, explicitly selling itself on the natural wonders of the place where she lives — the American Riviera as some call Montecito — and its orchard. In this, once again, it is very much following in the Flamingo Estate footsteps.
The website explains the ethos thus: ‘This is the home of radical pleasure. High atop the hills of Los Angeles, hidden by a lush orchard and dense gardens, Flamingo Estate is a pleasure-obsessed home of sun-worship, folk mythologies, and psychedelic remedies grown only by farmers we know and trust.
‘A house for dreaming, making, and full-bodied garden-grown pleasure.
It continues: ‘With the help of our friends and a network of incredible farmers, we grow sage for soap and tomatoes for candles. We harvest salt from the cliffs of Big Sur and press olive oil from very old trees and keep bees for honey.
In all of it, we’re invested in pleasure — for ourselves and our clients and friends — because we think it’s a path to radical change and cataclysmic beauty.’
And it adds: ‘If something feels expensive here, it’s because these things are rare.’
Like Meghan, Flamingo Estate keeps chickens, and sells their eggs. It also has goats which, with more than a nod towards Marie Antoinette, wear little cashmere vests after owner Richard thought that they looked cold in a Californian winter, and sent out a shout on social media for some cashmere for them to wear.
The full outline of Meghan’s new brand will become clear very soon, with sources saying that it will go live in early to mid-April. Already, it has released one short, stylish video which has seen Meghan wafting around her garden in a full-skirted black ballgown.
One interesting point is that the full-blooded elitism of the Flamingo offering has found a really lucrative niche among professional, city-dwelling women aged 24 to 40.
Here, Christiansen has found a market of women who have just enough spare cash to justify spending the best part of £200 on a candle. Will these women want to do the same for Meghan? You would bet on it — since her announcement, more than 560,000 follow the American Riviera Orchard Instagram account.
And if they all buy an elite jar of honey, or jam, or olive oil a year, the Sussexes could finally find themselves on the path to future financial comfort.
As Del Boy almost said, ‘This time next year, Harry, we could be millionaires…’
