On Tea, Storytelling, and the Things We Notice

The Tea Atelier, an intimate tasting hosted by Alpesh Kandoi, Founder of Bombay Design Co. with Snigdha Manchanda, Founder of Tea Trunk on 25th September 2026, in Greenwich, London.

Bombay Design Co. was born from a fascination with details, the kind hidden in stone, carved into wood, woven into thread. Last Friday evening, in London, we found that same fascination waiting inside a teacup.

We gathered for The Tea Atelier, an intimate tasting hosted with Snigdha Manchanda, India's first certified Tea Sommelier and founder of Tea Trunk. Over the course of an hour, we travelled cup by cup through the tea gardens of India, each pour a small, specific place: a hillside, a season, a particular way the leaves were picked and dried.

What struck us most was how familiar the ritual felt. At Bombay Design Co., our days are spent looking closely, at a motif repeated across a city's architecture, at the particular curve of a carved arch, at the way a thread catches light differently depending on how it's worked into cloth. Tea tasting, it turns out, asks the same of you. Snigdha guided us to notice the colour of each brew before we drank it, the warmth rising in steam, the way a single sip could hold an entire landscape if we slowed down enough to taste it.

It reminded us that storytelling and sensory detail aren't only found in objects. They live equally in a cup of tea, a gesture, a shared hour with people who are paying attention to the same small thing at the same time. On Friday, the instinct that shapes every piece we design lived somewhere else for a while: not in a thread, but in a teacup.

Thank you to Snigdha, for guiding us through India's tea gardens with such intrigue, and to everyone who joined us for an evening of good company and better tea.

Until the next cup.

This evening was photographed by Drihan Bester

— Alpesh, Founder, Bombay Design Co. I'd love to hear from you, write to me at alpesh@bombaydesign.co