Chandelier Creative farms branded honey at their Montauk surf retreat Ideas tend to be fleeting but, as the only food source with no known shelf life, honey quite literally lasts a lifetime. Aiming to combine the two and, in doing so, live up to its name, NYC-based agency Chandelier Creative set up a Montauk retreat to farm fresh honey, and give employees a place to go for rest, relaxation and inspiration. Presenting a new kind of bohemian enclave, Chandelier's beautifully appointed, multipurpose Surf Shack fosters morale from within, while productively churning out an actual product for a whole new way of marketing itself. As the son of Australian honey farmers, Chandelier founder Richard Christiansen outfitted his digs with the proper authority, hand-selecting a range of coastal flowers native to Montauk to ensure his bees would produce a special kind of honey. For the Surf Shack he chose an array of black-eyed Susans, honeysuckle and echinacea and, much like he did with the Shack's carefully decorated interior, Christiansen built and painted a custom hive to befit the Chandelier bees.

"Making honey is a true labor of love" he explains. "My family has always said that happy bees make sexy honey. And the same is true for creatives." With a keen eye and trained tongue, Christiansen describes the honey as slightly lighter in color than most, due to the native Montauk nectar, with a taste that's "very soft and gentle," but "a little salty, too." Packaged by members of the Chandelier Creative team, the honey is gifted to every weekend visitor, be it boyfriend, girlfriend, client or friend as a sweet reminder to keep creating with the dedication and vigor of a honey bee. Throughout the 2011 summer the unique blend of flora led the Chandelier bees to produce an end-of-season surplus of 300 jars, of which some 75 are still available. The remaining jars can be purchased exclusively through the Chandelier Creative online shop, along with a rotation of "special collaborations with our favorite people." Chandelier Creative aims to re-open the Surf Shack in May with the addition of chickens and vegetables, likely to help continue the expansion of the Chandelier brand from the ground up.

SUMMER, as branded by Richard Christiansen, the 34-year-old head of Chandelier Creative, a buzzy boutique Manhattan advertising agency with a focus on fashion, is surf-inflected and campy (or “campy,” as Susan Sontag would have it).And Mr. Christiansen has meticulously styled a cedar A-frame built in the 1950s — a rental, no less — to reflect that vision, switching out the contents for furnishings that are more theme-appropriate, or “on brand,” as he put it, including Day-Glo surf paintings bought in Hawaii and an armada of vintage webbed lawn chairs. (The house’s owners need not worry: every one of their possessions has been photographed, bubble-wrapped, labeled and placed in storage nearby, so as to be redeployed with military precision when Mr. Christiansen decamps at the end of the year.)There are now pickup lines painted on the bathroom mirrors (“Hey I lost my number, Can I have yours?” reads one), Hudson’s Bay blankets on bunk beds and tepees on the lawn, so the place can sleep at least 20, as it does most weekends.

And in beehives painted in yellow-and-white stripes, which vaguely resemble yacht ensigns, a couple of thousand bees are making honey, having dined on lavender, bee balm, Russian sage, honeysuckle and echinacea, a strict diet Mr. Christiansen planted this spring, so the honey’s flavor is just right. “Even my bees are art directed,” he said proudly.It was early on a steamy Friday morning, and Mr. Christiansen, a fresh-faced Australian who grew up on a farm near Byron Bay, was explaining how the writings of Richard Branson and the love letters Ronald Reagan sent to Nancy Reagan gave him the idea to turn a rental in this Hamptons surf suburb into a weekend extension of his office.chandeliers edinburgh gumtree Mr. Branson, you see, used to invite his staff into bed “for a cuddle,” a custom Mr. Christiansen adopted when he started Chandelier in his apartment seven years ago.“chandelier box urmston

Branson was all about dissolving the home-slash-work disconnect, so the personal becomes the professional,” he said. “You get better ideas that way.“And I was reading ‘I Love You, Ronnie,’ which is very lovely and very emotional, and in it, they both talk about the whirlwind of the job and the solace they got at their ranch and at Camp David. So I had this thought: Wouldn’t it be amazing to have our own version of Camp David?”ulla darni chandeliers for saleMany on his staff are surfers (die-hard Far Rockaway types in the winter), which is why this ad agency’s camp is in Montauk, not the Hamptons, and why it’s called Chandelier Surf Shack, a name you’ll find painted in hot pink on driftwood signs and embroidered onto pillowcases. “Any opportunity to brand,” Mr. Christiansen said, his voice trailing off.Hot pink, or magenta, as he prefers to call it, is Chandelier’s banner color, chosen as an emblem of arch excess, or “sparkle with a wink.”

Having grown up helping his parents package “the authentic Australian experience” for Japanese tourists on their farm (putting frozen crabs into a river to be “caught”), Mr. Christiansen is adept at creating stage sets and finding shortcuts that read as authentic.So is his twin brother, Geoffrey, managing director at Chandelier, who was also here that Friday morning and offered a frame of honey from one of the hives to a reporter, who plunged her spoon into the perfectly formed honeycombs.“We learned to think on our feet, to make something shiny and fantastic and still sort of authentic,” Richard Christiansen said. “It was all very jazz hands,” he added, waggling his own.The brothers began shopping in early spring for the accouterments to set the stage, with the help of Lena Kuffner, a production designer they have worked with in Los Angeles, who combed the flea markets there for crocheted bedspreads, Navajo blankets and surf-themed art books. The lawn chairs came from eBay, and cost from $5 to $500 each.

They are seating for the movies that play on a canvas sheet hanging from a tree and weighted with nautical rope. In heavy rotation last week was “I Am Love,” the overwrought Tilda Swinton vehicle. “I’m practicing my Italian,” said Richard Christiansen, who flew to Italy Sunday for work; Chandelier is helping to remake Amica, the Italian fashion magazine.Mr. Christiansen asks that guests (mostly co-workers and their boyfriends and girlfriends, and a client or two) bring a bottle of wine and a movie; now, he said, the collection at the house includes “Clueless” and “Grey Gardens,” the remake, that is, starring Drew Barrymore.“I’m thinking we should rename the Surf Shack ‘Magenta Gardens,’ ” he said.If it all seems like an episode of “Portlandia,” the arch sendup of Northern left coast culture featuring an ad agency where employees navigate Frisbee mazes and ideate in hot-air balloons, that’s no mistake.“The thing about most major ad agencies,” said Barbara Lippert, the former Adweek critic who is now curator of popular culture at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, “is that they are designed to be like a weekend house.

You have basketball courts and coffee bars and bleachers with pillows so people can take naps. People work insane hours and never leave. At our place, everybody can bring a dog, a policy that makes for a certain amount of merriment and also calm.”The rattan chairs around the fire pit came from Anthropologie, as did many of the glass lanterns hanging from a tree above.“My accountant has joked that this is the Anthropologie pop-up store, and that we will have to have a Madoff-style fire sale at the end of the summer,” Mr. Christiansen said.How much did it all cost? He declined to say: “My fear is that my staff will read it and use it against me when they ask for a raise.”Last fall, Mr. Christiansen was invited to spend a weekend at Skylands, Martha Stewart’s thunderous stone mansion in Maine, where the pink granite gravel is washed each season and the pine needles lying on the ground are sieved of debris. He came away, he said, a changed man. “It was all about a clarity of vision: Martha really lives her brand,” he said, still in awe.“