Richard Christiansen was working in the offices at Flamingo Estate, his farm and lifestyle brand in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, when Pamela Anderson’s son, Brandon Lee, called him to ask if he’d be interested in collaborating with his mother.
“He said, ‘Would you like to do something with my mom? She’s a big gardener,’” Christiansen recalls. “They don’t have the same surname, so I didn’t know who he was talking about so I was like, ‘OK, who’s your mom?’ He said, ‘Pamela Anderson.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit!”
At that point, Flamingo Estate was making a name for itself, among other things, for its celeb honey collaborations. Christiansen had already partnered with Julianne Moore and LeBron James to create their limited-edition lines of honey. All Flamingo Estate celebrity partnerships benefit not-for-profits. The celebs do not get paid for their work.
When Anderson arrived for their first meeting, Christiansen gave her his customary honey pitch. “I wanted her to do a honey, like many of the ones we’ve done,” says Christiansen, who grew up on a bee farm in Australia. “Honey’s easy for us. I take my hives to someone’s house to do. Like we tied them to LeBron’s roof or for Ed Ruscha recently, we put the hives in his studio. Julianne Moore’s honey was from her garden in Montauk. It’s some of the best. It’s dark and it’s almost molasses, like whisky.”
But Anderson had another idea. “She said matter-of-factly, ‘I want to do pickles with you. It’s my aunt’s recipe,’” Christiansen says. Anderson’s $38 jars of pickles raised $500,000 for the California Wildlife Center.
I am talking to Christiansen on Zoom shortly before the release of his new book, “Pleasure Principles.” The gorgeously illustrated and designed 408-page tome, subtitled “An Almanac from the Garden,” features recipes, DIY projects and musings on a range of topics from the cinematic history of the moon to celebrity restaurants in L.A.
If anything, “Pleasure Principles” serves as a look inside Christiansen’s very creative and colorful mind. “I don’t have a car,” he explains. “I ride my bicycle everywhere, and when I’m on my bike, I dictate into my phone. That’s maybe why everything’s short, these short little stories.”
Christiansen’s latest Hollywood collaboration is a first for him, a movie tie-in with “Practical Magic 2.” Not only do several Flamingo Estate products, including bottles of olive oil and Green Goddess candles, appear in the movie, but Christiansen has also curated a gift box inspired by the Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock film.
It’s a few days after Dolly Parton passed away in August. I ask Christiansen to name a celebrity he’d love to work with. “We were going to do a coffee with Dolly called ‘8 to 6’ instead of ‘9 to 5,’” he says. “We had some lovely conversations about it, and then it didn’t end up happening because we were too young at that point and our distribution probably couldn’t handle the weight of her reach. That was the one that got away.”
