This is my favorite room, the bathing cathedral. I’m obsessed with Plumeria trees, and I found these two for $30 on Craigslist. These are David Hockney’s 13 drawings of Los Angeles. David Hockney’s “Caribbean Tea Time.” This is Jane Fonda’s bedroom. Before that, it was an erotic film studio, a pirate radio station and an artist commune. I bought Flamingo Estate about four years ago. Transcript House Tour | Flamingo Estate Richard Christiansen, the founder of Chandelier Creative, shows off his newly renovated Los Angeles home that once headquartered an erotic film studio. (John’s partner, Ralph, died not long before Christiansen and John met.) Eventually, John agreed to sell his property on the condition that its overstuffed interiors (which Christiansen had never seen - their talks took place in the garden, then a tangle of parched plants) remain a mystery until the deal was done. This didn’t stop Christiansen from falling in love with it, and for months he visited its aging owner, a friendly man named John who would answer the door in a robe and leopard-print underwear. Built in the 1940s by a longtime couple, two men who had met as Navy sailors stationed in the South Pacific, it was in decay, the glass missing from its windows. He had been working on an advertising campaign in town when he discovered this sprawling Spanish colonial-style home secluded at the top of a hill, across the street from a friend’s place. Christiansen - wearing loose, clay-toned clothing and a wide-brimmed straw hat, with a happy goldendoodle padding by his side - has been tending his garden, a 7-acre stepped Babylonia of agave, plumerias, rhododendron and half a dozen species of basil tilled from what was once a sandy patch of nothing there are crescents of earth beneath his fingernails. He calls to me from a ziggurat-like brick staircase laid into a dusty hillside that leads from his garden up to his new home, a sherbet-pink confection that glows in the late-afternoon sunlight. Richard Christiansen, the 42-year-old founder of the New York-based agency Chandelier Creative, heard the siren call of Los Angeles earlier this decade and now lives in its Eagle Rock neighborhood, northeast of downtown. It remains, as the artist David Hockney put it, “the edge of the Western world.” It hums a million small reasons to slough off your life and move there - 72 degrees and sunny (even when it’s not), the city feels like it unfurls forever, offering the wild promise of self-invention, a frontier land of permissiveness and cheap avocados and good light.
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