Why it belongs in ORBIS
Hand-assembled, single-estate whole-leaf teas from high-elevation gardens across eight countries, blended at the atelier's own former pencil factory in Greenpoint.
Michael Shannon and Heidi Johannsen Stewart met working as a designer and stylist at Martha Stewart Living, where a shared interest in tea turned into Bellocq — a brand that began as a London pop-up on King's Road in 2011, planned to run only a few months but successful enough to stay open a year, before the founders brought it home to a former pencil factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Bellocq works exclusively in single-estate, whole-leaf tea, sourcing from high-elevation gardens across China, Japan, India, Nepal, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Malawi, with leadership spending months abroad each year visiting the estates directly. Every blend is still hand-assembled rather than machine-mixed, a small-batch discipline the founders extended into perfumed candles built around the same tea profiles.
From a design-world friendship and a short-lived London pop-up to a Greenpoint atelier sourcing across eight countries, Bellocq's arc is a case of stylists' instincts for craft and presentation applied directly to the leaf itself.