Laguna Beach candle company the Hundredth Acre sparked a flame of hope for its owner
Kirsten Montgomery was in need of a lifeline when she chanced upon “the little candle company that could.”
In the aftermath of a divorce, followed by nearly a decade of socializing, drinking and bad decisions that brought her to her lowest point during the pandemic, the Laguna Beach resident found herself walking the long road to recovery in 2021.
Trying not to lapse back into drinking, Montgomery, at 50, was searching for meaning and purpose in her life and found it when a visit to the studio of a longtime friend and local candle maker Robert Brink led to an offer she couldn’t refuse.
Brink was five years into running the Hundredth Acre — which sold small-batch, hand-poured soy wax candles with aromas intended to evoke memories of walks through the woods, the smell of air after rain, used bookstores and beach bonfires — and looking to move onto other things.
It was a meeting of minds and a lifeline for Montgomery, who now pours and sells candles in a range of scents, including the bestseller “Main Beach,” along with journals, pens and T-shirts with a vintage literary feel.
Her wares can be found in shops all over Laguna Beach, including Bushard’s Pharmacy, Twig boutique, the Pearl Street General Store and home goods store Beach House. She is even considering expanding to offer a refilling service for customers.
It’s a far cry from where she was two short years ago, Montgomery acknowledged in an interview Wednesday.
“I was always the person who had no purpose in life,” she said. “[And] I think what I’m doing in my life right now is pretty bad ass.”
Known as “Kiki” among her friends, Montgomery came to Laguna Beach in 2011 with her former husband and decided to stay, even when the 10-year marriage ended. It would be a turning point in her life.
“This is when I had a lot of fun,” she recalled. “I had a pocketful of money from the divorce, and I left everything behind. I got to know a lot of people at bars and restaurants and going out. They even called me the mayor of Laguna Beach because I knew everybody.”
She earned an interior design degree and worked odd jobs but spent most of her 40s having fun and “just avoiding reality,” when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered her favorite watering holes. That’s when she started drinking alone.
“From that March to just around October was when I really hit it hard,” she said, remembering a series of poor choices, unfulfilling relationships and bad behavior. “It was almost like I was looking down upon this life that was going on and thinking, what’s my purpose?”
Montgomery wrote an email to her personal network of friends and family members, as well as her therapist and ex-husband, reaching out for help. An old friend and recovering alcoholic came to Laguna Beach and helped her sober up in December 2020.
Attending meetings in between pandemic shutdowns, she worked hard to occupy her time, especially around 3 p.m., a “witching hour” when the urge to drink hit the hardest.
She decorated her home, painting and repainting walls and rearranging furniture, trying to create new routines and habits. During this time, Montgomery found lighting candles helped steady her nerves.
“It just creates an ambience for me. They definitely have a calming effect,” she said.
In spring 2021, finding herself in need of candles, she reached out to Brink, a writer, skateboarder and marketing professional who’d created the Hundredth Acre in 2016 as a candle and stationery company and lifestyle brand for the contemplative sort.
After leaving a corporate job several years earlier Brink, now 47, started the enterprise as sort of a personal project to see where his ideas might lead.
A kitchen alchemist experimenting through trial and error, he created scent combinations intended to induce memories and feelings of nostalgia. The result was candles with evocative names, like “Grandpa’s Leather Chair,” “Sitting by the Fire” and “Walk in the Woods,” which Brink mostly sold online.
“I’d take hundreds of scents and think, which of these scents can I use to tell a story?” the Laguna Beach resident recalled Thursday.
The business grew as Brink filled mostly online orders from his local studio, eventually getting to a point where it demanded more than he wanted to give. With other projects in mind — including filmmaking, writing a novel and working with the U.S. Olympic skateboarding team — he was looking to offload.
So, when Montgomery sent him a text asking if she could swing by his studio to pick up some candles, he jokingly asked her if she was in the market for a candle company. The joke quickly turned to serious talk.
“She came to the studio that day and told me she was pretty deep in recovery and wanted a project to focus on, to kick-start her new life as a sober person,” said Brink, who sold Montgomery the Hundredth Acre on a payment plan.
“I was so happy it was going to a bigger purpose, and I was proud of her, so I was like, yeah, let’s do this.”
Nearly two years later, Montgomery is taking her sobriety one day at a time, but the business has given her the drive and purpose that had been missing in her life.
Now, she wants to share the gift she’s received by someday teaching others to replicate the Hundredth Acre in their own necks of the woods.
“I’ve got a really, really full life now — fuller, obviously, than it ever was when I was sitting on a bar stool,” she said Wednesday. “I don’t know if I would have gotten to sobriety without this.”
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