The Flamingo Estate Bathhouse: Kohler Built It Inside a Courtyard That Has Been Rebuilt Twice

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 9 min

Kohler and Flamingo Estate built a bathhouse for Milan Design Week 2026 about slowness, ritual and reciprocity with nature. They built it inside a courtyard that has been destroyed and rebuilt twice, first by wartime bombing, later by a terrorist attack, each time by the same architect’s plan. The building’s own history makes the bathhouse’s argument for it before a single tap has run.

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Introduction

Kohler and Flamingo Estate presented the Flamingo Estate Bathhouse at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Via Palestro 14, Milan, from 20 to 26 April 2026, during Milan Design Week. The installation was conceived by Richard Christiansen, founder of the Los Angeles wellness and lifestyle brand Flamingo Estate, working with Kohler’s design team, including Michael Seum, Kohler’s vice president of global design, and JB Han, Kohler’s design director on the project. The centrepiece was a Kohler Reverie freestanding bath, enamelled cast iron cased in polished copper, the first time Kohler has used copper as a bath’s defining material, set inside a raw, brutalist structure surrounded by a wildflower meadow built specifically to shelter bees and pollinators.

That description alone would place the Flamingo Estate Bathhouse among a crowded field of wellness-themed installations at Milan Design Week 2026. What separates it is the courtyard it was built in.

A courtyard that has been rebuilt twice

The Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea was designed by the architect Ignazio Gardella, whose plan was selected in 1948 and completed in 1954, built on a site cleared after wartime bombing destroyed the villa gardens that had previously stood there. The building has since been rebuilt a second time. On 27 July 1993, a car bomb planted by Cosa Nostra exploded on Via Palestro outside the Pavilion, part of a wider mafia bombing campaign that also struck Florence and Rome that year. Five people died, three firefighters, a municipal guard and a civilian, and the blast and a subsequent gas explosion badly damaged the building and the works inside it. Gardella himself oversaw its reconstruction to his original design, and the Pavilion reopened in 1996 with an exhibition dedicated to the gallerist Leo Castelli. Milan still marks the anniversary of the attack publicly each July.

None of the Milan Design Week coverage of the Flamingo Estate Bathhouse surveyed for this piece mentions that history. It is worth stating plainly here, because a bathhouse built around ritual, slowness and reciprocity with nature sits inside a building whose own architect twice proved that a structure can be destroyed and still be brought back exactly as it was meant to be.

Gardella did not treat the 1996 reconstruction as an opportunity to reinvent the Pavilion. He rebuilt it to his own original plan, with the technical improvements that four decades of use and a second disaster had shown were needed, but the building the city reopened with a Leo Castelli retrospective is recognisably the one that first opened in 1954. That choice, continuity over reinvention, is a smaller version of the same instinct the bathhouse itself is built around: that some things are worth putting back together exactly as they were, rather than starting again from nothing.

Richard Christiansen’s own bathhouse, moved to Milan

The Flamingo Estate Bathhouse is not a generic concept built for the fair. It is a direct translation of a bathhouse Christiansen already built at Flamingo Estate itself, the seven-acre Los Angeles property he bought in 2013 and turned, from 2020 onward, into the wellness and lifestyle brand that carries its name. Flamingo Estate began during the pandemic as boxes of produce sold to neighbours to help local farmers stay afloat, and it has since grown to include candles, soap, wine and honey, built around Christiansen’s own line, that Mother Nature is the last great luxury house.

The growth from that starting point has been fast by any measure. Christiansen has said the company was doing close to ten million dollars in sales by 2022, still only two years after its first produce boxes, and it completed its first outside fundraising round in 2024, the same year it opened pop-up stores in the Hamptons with the retailer Mytheresa and launched a toiletries collaboration with Marriott International. A brand that started as a way to keep a handful of local farmers afloat during a lockdown has, within five years, become established enough that a hotel group and a 150-year-old bathroom manufacturer have each chosen to build something with it.

The LA bathhouse that inspired the Milan structure draws on Brutalist architecture and on the bathing culture of ancient Persian fortresses, and Christiansen has described the Milan version in the same terms he uses for the original: a place of ritual, somewhere to slow down, reconnect and be fully present. Moving that specific building, rather than a generic bathing concept, into a courtyard with its own history of destruction and repair is what gives the installation its argument.

What Kohler actually built

Kohler’s contribution centred on the Reverie, a freestanding enamelled cast-iron bath cased in polished copper, which Kohler states is the first time copper has been used as the defining material on one of its baths. The bath contains at least 80 per cent recycled material by Kohler’s own account. David Kohler, chair and chief executive of Kohler Co., framed the collaboration as continuous with the company’s own history: “Design and the creative process are always central to Kohler, shaping our tradition and propelling our progress.” Michael Seum put the material choice in more specific terms: “Copper carries a warmth and vitality that felt especially resonant here.”

Kohler also cast four one-of-a-kind pollinator baths at its historic foundry in Kohler, Wisconsin, conceived by Christiansen and designed by Han, finished in flame-sprayed copper. These were not decorative objects. They were shallow, geometrically patterned vessels built specifically to give bees and other pollinators a safe water source, since a conventional birdbath’s depth and smooth sides can drown insects that land on it. A four-object commission built around insect safety is an unusual brief for a bathroom manufacturer to take on, and it is also the clearest sign of how far the collaboration’s ecological framing went beyond messaging.

The choice of foundry matters here too. Kohler has cast plumbing fixtures at the same Wisconsin site since the company’s earliest years, and putting the pollinator baths through that foundry meant treating an insect water dish with the same production process and material standard the company applies to a full-scale bath. That is a deliberate levelling, an object built for bees given the same manufacturing weight as one built for a person, a literal, physical form of reciprocity with nature rather than a claim made only in the surrounding language.

A meadow for pollinators, not just people

The bathhouse stood inside a 247-square-foot wildflower meadow planted with seven species native to the region, built to draw the same bees and pollinators the cast-iron baths were designed to serve. Positioning a working pollinator habitat inside a Milan Design Week courtyard, rather than a planted backdrop for photography, is what makes the ecological framing more than a theme. The meadow and the pollinator baths were built to function whether or not a visitor noticed them, which is a different proposition from an installation built only to be looked at.

The glass, the plaster and the candles

The bathhouse’s interior surfaces came from two distinct craft traditions. Its exterior was finished in intonachino, an Italian plaster technique that produces concrete’s mineral texture and tone without concrete’s mass, chosen to keep the brutalist reference legible without the weight a poured structure would have required inside a listed courtyard. Its windows were handmade stained glass by Samuele Dossena, a Milan-based master glass artisan whose studio, Dossena Vetrate, specialises in restoring the city’s historic Liberty-era stained glass, the same decorative movement that shaped Milan’s early twentieth-century apartment buildings. His work on the bathhouse extended that restoration craft into an entirely new structure rather than a repair, applying techniques normally used to bring a century-old window back to a building built the same year the installation opened.

More than two hundred Flamingo Estate candles lined the walls, a limited-edition scent called Golden Pollinator, made to evoke the linden trees that flower across Milan each April, timing the fragrance to the same week visitors were standing in the room. The candle’s name folds back into the pollinator baths outside: the same insects the meadow was built to shelter are the ones drawn to a linden tree in bloom, so the room’s scent and the courtyard’s ecology were designed to describe the same seasonal event rather than two separate ideas.

Two companies, a century and a half apart

Kohler was founded in Wisconsin in 1873 and remains family-run five generations later, with David Kohler now serving as chair and chief executive. Flamingo Estate is five years old, founded in 2020 out of a pandemic produce delivery. Putting the two together is an unusual pairing on paper, but the Flamingo Estate Bathhouse is not the first time the two companies’ worlds have overlapped: Kohler acquired the British basin maker Kast in 2023, a company built on the same commitment to visible material honesty that runs through Flamingo Estate’s own products, casting each basin from real aggregate concrete rather than a moulded composite designed to imitate it.

The pairing works because both companies have staked their design identity on the same wager: that a material left visibly itself, whether that is Kast’s aggregate concrete, Kohler’s copper or Flamingo Estate’s own unrefined produce and honey, reads as more valuable than one disguised to look finished. A 150-year-old industrial manufacturer and a five-year-old wellness brand arrived at that same conclusion from opposite directions, one from a century and a half of foundry work, the other from five years of selling vegetables to neighbours, and met in the same Milan courtyard to build a bath around it.

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Final thoughts

The Flamingo Estate Bathhouse would still be a well-made installation without its setting, a copper bath, a working pollinator meadow, hand-blown stained glass and two hundred candles scented to match the trees outside. What the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea adds is a piece of context neither Kohler nor Flamingo Estate wrote into their own material: a building that has twice been taken apart by forces well outside its architect’s control, and twice been put back together exactly as it was meant to be. A bathhouse about slowing down, paying attention and trusting a natural process to work is standing in the one courtyard in Milan that has already proved a structure can survive that and still function as intended.