High Time for Tea

Maybe Julia Faye Briggs should have read tea leaves to reveal her future. She would have found out that she was going to have a second career after she retired as an IT specialist for the government. Serendipity led Briggs to an empty space in The Stone Mansion (4901 Springarden Dr., 410-367-8253), an 1863 rambling home in the city’s modern-day Coldspring Newtown neighborhood near Sinai Hospital. “I wasn’t looking to open a business,” she says. “It was looking for me.” She opened Tea by Julia Faye Tea Room & Tea Store in 2010. The charming dining room, in the mansion’s former servants’ kitchen, includes a walk-in brick fireplace decorated with hatboxes, tiny lights, and delicate teapots. Briggs serves an assortment of teas, homemade scones and cookies, and sandwiches for casual lunches, royal teas, birthday parties, and wedding showers. Of her customers, she says, “They come here, and they don’t want to go.”