The Guide to Becoming Alive

From inside the walls of Flamingo Estate—an abundant, visually rich guide to filling each day with radical pleasure, including wisdom on wellness, food, activism, design, nature, work, love, and more.

Perched high above Los Angeles and nestled within a lush orchard and verdant gardens sits Flamingo Estate, a pleasure-filled enclave of nature worship, folk mythologies, and powerful healing remedies. At Flamingo, Mother Earth is the ultimate luxury and pleasure is a human right.

Flamingo Estate’s founder, Richard Christiansen, invites you inside his home and to meet his friends and heroes. Presenting fifteen pleasure principles inspired by nature's wisdom, Christiansen reveals how a deep relationship with nature offers a life of pleasure and joy.

Discover how to flirt like an orchid, embrace winters like a plum tree, work like wisteria, and court your shadow like the fern. Combining hundreds of images and luxurious rituals for well-being with stories from Christiansen’s own journey of awakening, Flamingo Estate: The Guide to Becoming Alive is a rousing call to reject a life of tedium and luxuriate in the radical pleasures of the natural world.