World Builders

At Bellerby & Co., hundreds of hours are spent crafting globes that don't just depict the planet-they chart, in mesmerising detail, your individual journey or your family's history upon it.

- Tom Weijand

TO CALL BELLERBY & CO.’S products globes sounds criminally reductive, in the same way it’s not quite enough to refer to a Ferrari as a car or to the Mona Lisa as a painting. This London-based team builds meticulously detailed models of our planet, almost entirely by hand and ranging in size from about 12.7cm up to 127cm in diameter. Many are bespoke commissions, painted to highlight the buyer’s personal history; the most elaborate versions can cost as much as US$110,000.

Founder Peter Bellerby, who previously worked in TV and real estate, went in search of a globe to give his father as an 80th-birthday present in 2008. He wasn’t impressed with what he found, so he set about building one himself.

It took more than two years to perfect the process—and by that time he’d received his first custom order. The company has since grown from three people to about 30 employees, including cartographers, wood- and metal-workers, and many, many painters.

“Over-engineering is our way of doing everything,” Bellerby says. And while there’s impressive technical skill involved in making these three-dimensional maps, their most notable quality may be their phenomenal artistry. The globes are best thought of as hand-painted, rotating sculptures that can memorialise a life’s journey, say, or a family’s migration history, or detail a region’s flora and fauna. “People put their whole lives on a globe,” Bellerby notes.